OECD Competition Trends 2025

In 2018, under the guidance of the Bureau of the Competition Committee, the OECD Secretariat launched an initiative to develop a database of general statistics relating to competition agencies, including data on enforcement and information on market studies.

Some statistics related to competition authorities’ activities are already publicly available. However, this information is often dispersed, lacks consistency across time and jurisdictions, and is currently not used systematically to identify overall trends from which to draw policy lessons. This initiative fills this gap.

The OECD Secretariat collects data annually from competition authorities in: (i) OECD jurisdictions; (ii)  non-OECD jurisdictions that are Participants or Associates in the OECD Competition Committee; and (iii)  jurisdictions that are neither OECD member nor a participant or associate in the OECD Competition Committee but have expressed an interest to join the database.

The OECD CompStats database currently covers data from competition agencies in 69 jurisdictions, of which 38 jurisdictions are OECD jurisdictions (including the European Commission).1

There are four geographic regions used in Chapter 3: Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and Middle East and Africa (MEA). The 69 jurisdictions in the OECD CompStats database are allocated to these geographic regions as follows (jurisdictions with an asterisk (*) are considered as OECD members for the data analysis):

• Americas (15): Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Canada*, Chile*, Colombia*, Costa Rica*, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico*, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, and United States*.

• Asia-Pacific (12): Australia*, Hong Kong (China), Indonesia, Japan*, Kazakhstan, Korea*, Malaysia, New Zealand*, Philippines, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, and Viet Nam.

• Europe (34): Albania, Austria*, Belgium*, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia*, Denmark*, European Commission*, Estonia, Finland*, France*, Germany*, Greece*, Hungary*, Iceland*, Ireland*, Italy*, Latvia*, Lithuania*, Luxembourg*, Malta, Montenegro, Netherlands*, Norway*, Poland*, Portugal*, Romania, Slovak Republic*, Slovenia*, Spain*, Sweden*, Switzerland*, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom*.

• MEA (8): COMESA, Israel*, Kenya, Mauritius, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Tunisia, and Türkiye*.

The OECD CompStats database contains nine years of annual data for the period 2015 to 2023. Given that not all the jurisdictions provide data for all variables for all years, totals and averages presented in this report are calculated using the information of the jurisdictions that provided data for the variable for the entire period.

The following areas are currently covered in OECD CompStats database.

• Budget

• Number of staff

• Number of competition staff

• Number of decisions (infringement and other decisions)

• Number of decisions per industry

• Number of decisions related to bid-rigging

• Number of decisions on vertical agreements

• Number of cases with settlements or plea bargain

• Number of cases with negotiated/consensual procedure for settling cases

• Number of leniency applications

• Number of investigations launched

• Number of cases that used a dawn raid

• Total amount of fines imposed

• Number of companies fined

• Number of cases with fines on individual

• Number of cases with imprisonment of individual

• Number of decisions (infringement and other decisions)

• Number of decisions per industry

• Number of cases with settlements or plea bargain

• Number of cases with negotiated/consensual procedure for settling cases

• Number of investigations launched

• Number of cases that used a dawn raid

• Total amount of fines imposed

• Number of companies fined

• Number of notifications

• Number of Phase One (or single phase) clearances

• Number of Phase One (or single phase) clearances with remedies

• Number of Phase Two clearances (after an in-depth investigation)

• Number of Phase Two clearances with remedies

• Number of prohibitions (or trials)

• Number of withdrawn notifications by merging parties

• Number of market studies

To enrich the database and allow for better and in-depth analysis, the Secretariat has added the following variables to the database:

• Gross domestic product (GDP, current prices, purchasing power parity), inflation and population data from the World Bank development indicators database. For some jurisdictions (Japan and Chinese Taipei), GDP data is from the International Monetary Fund (GDP, current prices, purchasing power parity). It is relevant to note that for 2023, the World Bank adjusted its methodology to calculate the purchasing power parity conversion factor, thus, adjusted variables are not comparable with previous versions of the report.

• Year of implementation of competition law

• Year of establishment of competition agency

• Year of adoption of merger control

• Year of establishment of a leniency programme

• Characteristics of merger control regimes in CompStats (mandatory vs. voluntary merger notification, filing-fee requirements, selected criteria for establishing merger-notification threshold, use of simplified merger regime, and one‑phase vs. two‑phase approaches)

The following competition authorities contributed with the information for the OECD CompStats Database.