CCPC Impact Assessment Report 2017-2020
The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) has published a report that estimates the potential value to consumers of the organisation’s competition enforcement and merger control work.
As the statutory body responsible for promoting compliance with competition law in Ireland, the CCPC conducts investigations across all sectors of the economy and can take civil or criminal enforcement action if evidence of breaches of competition law are found.
The report estimates the benefit from cases in which the CCPC took enforcement action, or where the merger control process resulted in changes to address competition concerns. The estimate does not include the – likely much larger – benefits from deterring breaches of competition law and of deterring companies from proposing anti-competitive mergers.
This is the first study to estimate an aspect of the CCPC’s impact. The CCPC will examine how its work on assessing impact might be expanded in the future.
The assessment, which was carried out in 2021, estimated that in the period 2017 to 2020, the financial benefit to consumers from the CCPC’s competition enforcement and merger control work was €65.82 million.
The Exchequer cost of the CCPC’s work in these areas over this period was €9.18 million, meaning that for every €1 spent by the Exchequer on providing resources to the CCPC, benefits of €7.19 accrued to consumers, even without taking into account the deterrent effect of CCPC activities.
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