The Coordinator of the Economic Studies Working Group, Mr. Juan Pablo Herrera Saavedra, participated as a speaker in a workshop titled “Competition Assessments: Tools to Address Market Distortions”, which was organized by the Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) with the collaboration of the World Bank, and took place from December 12 to 15, 2016.
This workshop sought to provide collaboration and technical support to the recently created Philippine Competition Commission and its inaugural Economic Studies Working Group. The SIC was invited to participate considering its experience as the National Competition Authority of Colombia, and the purpose was to provide a broad vision on how to strengthen preventing competition policies, promote enforcement techniques in this field, and enhance economic analysis to address market distortions.
The participation of Mr. Herrera Saavedra helped the SIC to promote its international cooperation and strengthen its communication not only with the World Bank but also with a country of more than 100 million inhabitants, that surely shares common challenges in the design of its public policies. It should be noted that, according to the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, Colombia imported more than 40 million dollars from the Philippines in 2015 and, in recent years, there has been an increasing trend of the commercial relations with such country.