and Maastricht School of Management

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Starting Monday until yesterday, 15 participants from various government agencies, including staffers of the Guyana Competition and Consumer Affairs Commission, attended a workshop on competition law and policy designed to increase local knowledge and awareness of these areas and build institutional capacity in the context of the implementation of the CARIFORUM-EU Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).Competition law seeks to ensure that firms compete fairly with each other by applying appropriate rules.Competition can bring a number of benefits to Guyanese firms and consumers alike, such as driving enterprise, innovation and efficiency among businesses and creating a wider choice of goods for consumers to select from, that may be of a higher quality and lower cost.Participants benefitted from in-depth presentations on the three areas of competition law: anti-competitive agreements, abuse of dominance, and merger control regulation.According to a statement on the workshop, other topics covered included the economics of competition and the methodology for investigating a case using the Rule of Reason Procedure along with international dimensions of competition law and the evolution of jurisprudence in the US and EU for dealing with cross border anti-competitive conduct.“Participants also learnt the methodology of conducting market studies and gained an understanding of the importance of institution building, strategies for developing institutional capacity and winning support for the institution.”Dr. Taimoon Stewart, associate senior lecturer in Law at the University of the West Indies, was the workshop facilitator.The training course is an activity of the CARIFORUM-EU Capacity Building Project on Competition, Public Procurement and Customs and Trade Facilitation that is funded under the 10th EDF and under the overall supervision of the CARIFORUM Directorate, CARICOM.The project’s main objective is to support CARIFORUM Member States’ beneficial integration in the world economy.Specifically, it seeks to help member states implement their EPA commitments in the areas of Competition, Procurement and Customs and Trade Facilitation.A consortium led by Equinoccio (Spain) which includes the London School of Economics (UK), SGS (Netherlands) and Maastricht School of Management (Netherlands) is implementing the project.George Seales, a commissioner of the Competition and Consumer Affairs Commission, noted that he found the workshop to be very educational and informative.He said that the training he received had given him a wider scope in competition law coupled with economics.Seales recommended that all consumer bodies should hold similar collaborative seminars and workshops.