The aim of this report is to share experience among competition agencies in order to improve agency effectiveness. The report explores the correlation between competition agencies organisational design options and agency effectiveness. In this context, the term organisational design refers to the structure and functioning of the organisation.

There are links between the organisational structure, the functioning of the organisation and agency effectiveness. This is an important finding, considering the variety in human and financial resources, the political environment and the particular history that have led to the creation of the competition agencies, from the oldest agency (1870) to the youngest agency (2016) and from the largest agency (3 500 members of staff) to the smallest agency (3 members of staff).

Some of the headline findings from the survey are:

• All competition agencies are delegated additional functions beyond enforcement of competition laws;
• the choice of an organisational structure is correlated to the size of the competition agency. Small scale agencies tend to have a structure where units are based on law that is being enforced, while large-scale agencies tend to have a hybrid structure;
• the single most common structural form used by agencies is the hybrid structure, which refers to a combination of different functional and divisional structures;
• all competition agencies employ a mix of lawyers and economists;
• all competition agencies tend to favour experience sharing, i.e. a combination of legal and economic expertise in case teams;
• the existence of specialised (separate) units/departments tend to correlate with the size of the competition agency;
• 80% of the respondents have specialised legal units;
• 68% of the respondents have specialised economist units;
• 63% of the respondents have specialised international units;
• 21% of the respondents have specialised enforcement compliance, order, settlement or remedy unit/department;
• 57 % of the respondents have other specialised units;
• 74% of the respondents have experienced a change in the organisational design of its competition enforcement function in the last ten years;
• more than 50% of the small agencies have experienced a change in the organisational design, compared to middle-sized (82%) and large agencies (79%) and
• the most common impetuses of a re-organisation are as a result of an evaluation of working methods (“internal”) or additional functions having been added to the competition agency (“external”).