Title: Impact Assessment of Competition Policies and Regulation: 10 Years’ Experience from the Office of the Chief Economist in the Netherlands
Abstract: On April 1 2006, the Office of the Chief Economist was established at the Netherlands Competition Authority (NMa).To celebrate the tenth anniversary in 2016, the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM, the NMa's successor) organized a conference on the "Impact assessment of Interventions of Competition and Consumer Authorities".The conference was attended by scientists, policymakers, practitioners and Chief Economists of different competition authorities and the European Commission.From the very beginning, the NMa's Chief Economist and his team took the initiative to calculate the possible impact of interventions by the Dutch competition and regulatory authority on the economy.In 2008, a Special Issue of De Economist on the possible measurement of the impact of competition authorities was published. 1In this 2008 Special Issue the papers concentrated on the pros and cons of quantifying interventions by competition watchdogs.Some authors were rather sceptical about the calculation methods, while others stressed the political necessity of exposing the impact.In the introduction to that Special Issue (Don et al. 2008), it was stressed that some authorities are required by law to provide some form of impact assess-1 See De Economist 156, number 4, published in 2008.