Press Release 09/2018

6 July 2018

 

Autoridade da Concorrência - Portuguese Competition Authority (AdC) puts forward an action plan to implement OECD recommendations and proposals for pro-competitive legislative reform that represent benefits estimated at nearly 380 million euros per year for the Portuguese economy.

 

A  joint work AdC/OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) to assess the competitive impact of legislation and regulations in the transport sector and in liberal professions in Portugal, produced a OECD report containing some 765 recommendations for legislative and regulatory reform for those two areas of activity.

These recommendations aim to provide the transport sector and the professions with more competitive environments by eliminating provisions restricting competition, others representing disproportionate administrative burdens or obsolete provisions.

 

The proposals include, among others, the abolition of access and price restrictions for the market of long-distance bus routes, abolish quotas and geographical restrictions for taxis, broaden the private sector’s access to the activities of piloting, towing and cargo handling, open the market for the provision of port labour to temporary work agencies and bringing into force mandatory secondary legislation regarding certification of train drivers.

 

In liberal professions, the recommendations include the opening up of professions to individuals with university degrees in other fields, the elimination of restrictions on partnership, ownership and management of professional firms that should be available to individuals outside the profession as is the case of the legal professions, the abolition of restrictions on multidisciplinary societies, among others, which are equally significant.

The sectors of transport and liberal professions were chosen because of their weight in productivity, competitiveness and employability of the Portuguese economy.

The 13 self-regulated professions under analysis include legal professions (lawyers, notaries, solicitors and bailiffs), economic and financial (economists, certified accountants, statutory auditors and customs brokers), technical and scientific (architects, engineers and technical engineers) and health (nutritionists and pharmacists).

 

According to the latest available data, these professions (excluding health professions) generated a Gross Value Added (GVA) of around 4 billion euros for the Portuguese economy, corresponding to 2.3% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and represented about 3% of the total employed population.

 

The transport sector generated a GVA of 7.7 billion euros for the Portuguese economy, corresponding to 4.3% of GDP and employed 155 thousand people, equivalent to 3% of the entire employed population.

The positive impact of the elimination of barriers in these areas will, in turn, lead to an increase in the number of operators offering such services, lower prices with an amplified effect on the economy given they are inputs to other areas of the economy.

 

The now completed AdC/OECD cooperation project started in April 2016 enabled the AdC and other public stakeholders to reinforce their technical capacity in using the methodology established by the OECD in the Competition Assessment Toolkit.

The OECD Report, presented today, is available at the organization’s website.

 

The AdC will now have to promote and monitor the implementation of the recommended pro-competitive legislative and regulatory reforms, in close collaboration with all public decision-makers involved.