Does Competition Law Get its Job Done?

Both Chief Executive contenders in HK, Donald Tsang and Alan Leong, vow to introduce competition law if elected.

A new cross-country study reported that:

"We find, in ordinary least squares regressions, that the scope of a country's competition law is positively associated with the perceived intensity of competition in the country's economy. However, we find no evidence that the scope of competition law is positively associated with an objective proxy of the intensity of competition. Moreover, instrumental variables regressions, though preliminary, do not indicate that the scope of competition law affects the perceived intensity of competition."

Read the paper here. This should give Mr Tsang and Mr Leong pause in their rush to introduce competition law in HK. And here is my previous post on the same subject. Here is a blog on HK's competition law.