SELALatin American trade and competition officials have proposed a new regional working group on trade and competition within the Latin American and Caribbean System (SELA).

Latin American trade and competition officials have recommended creating a regional working group on trade and competition within the Latin American and Caribbean System (or SELA, its Spanish acronym).

Meeting in Brasilia on 26-28 May at a joint UNCTAD-SELA regional seminar on trade and competition, they discussed the interaction between trade and competition and to discuss the opportunities and challenges of enforcing competition and law and polices and trade liberalization in the region.

SELA is a Caracas-based intergovernmental organization aimed at promoting cooperation and integration within the region. It has 27 member countries.

At the seminar, Mr. Hassan Qaqaya, head of UNCTAD's Competition and Consumer Policies Programme, highlighted the importance of ensuring coherence between trade and competition policies to promote regional integration and economic development. International cartels and antidumping measures continue to pose serious challenges to competition agencies and trade policymakers and require enhanced regional cooperation in the enforcement of competition law. Competition law and policy should ensure that restrictive business practices do not negate the benefits of trade and investment liberalization, particularly for developing countries, he said.

Highly concentrated sectors where there is limited competition tend to lobby for protection and antidumping measures, which must be resisted to avoid inefficiency and misuse of resources, the meeting was told. Some delegates felt that proposals for adopting antidumping measures must be carefully reviewed by competition agencies in order to assess their anticompetitive effects.

Trade liberalization alone is often not enough to maintain an optimal level of competition in all economic sectors where market concentration is present, participants said. A number of trade barriers still exist, and new ones are often introduced to compensate for reductions in tariffs and the abolition of quantitative restrictions on trade, particularly by major Latin American trade partners. Greater regional cooperation on competition policy, along the lines of the UN Set of Principles on Competition Policy, could help address those issues, they concurred.

The seminar's proposal to create a new working group on this topic will be submitted to the SELA Council of Ministers for adoption this October. The UN Set, in turn, will be reviewed in Geneva in November by heads of competition authorities and senior officials of developed countries, developing countries, and economies in transition. Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1980, it remains the only multilateral instrument on competition policy.