CADE releases a study on the expected impacts of the agency's performance in 2020

The Department of Economic Studies measured the expected impacts of CADE fighting anticompetitive conduct and reviewing mergers in the year 2020

Published in Dec 07, 2021 02:18 PM Updated in Jun 27, 2023 05:52 PM

On 22 November 2021, the Department of Economic Studies (DEE) of CADE published a working paper on the benefits expected from the activities of the Brazilian antitrust agency in the year of 2020, titled “Mensuração dos benefícios esperados da atuação do Cade em 2020”.

The document follows the 2018 and 2019 studies on the performance of CADE and is in line with the efforts of antitrust authorities to assess the impact of their actions and make them public to society. The DEE analysis followed the methodology proposed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

According to the study, CADE’s activities of fighting anticompetitive conduct and assessing mergers in 2020 resulted in benefits that sum over BRL 4.2 billion, out of which BRL 3.2 billion derive solely from merger review. As to the fight against anticompetitive conduct, CADE amounted to BRL 610 million in cartel cases and BRL 401 million in unilateral conduct cases.

The estimated impact for 2020 amounts to less than the total reached in 2019 and 2018, which were BRL 36 billion and BRL 20.5 billion, respectively, as a result from cease and desist agreements CADE signed with Petrobras (2019) and decisions the authority granted on cartel cases related to the Operation Car Wash (2018).

Depending on the size of the markets and the total sales of the affected companies, results may vary considerably each year. For this reason, the OECD methodology suggests authorities calculate the moving average of the estimated impacts over a three-year period to “reduce the variability in estimates resulting from cases in particularly large or small markets that can happen in a single year”. The study is the third one the DEE elaborates on the topic and it is the first time this measurement is adopted, presenting an average of BRL 20.2 billion for the last three-year term.

According to the DEE, the estimates may be conservative, as they do not consider the dynamic or deterrent effects of the decisions nor the impact of other activities carried out by the authority, such as competition advocacy.

Access the working paper. (Portuguese only)