Evaluating public interest considerations in South African merger enforcement: an overview of the last decade

Abstract

In literature, most studies on mergers focus purely on competition-related aspects; additional conditions that can apply are labelled non-competition goals or public interest considerations (PICs). The imposition of these conditions is garnering more attention from the competition authorities as a means to assist the struggling economy in South Africa. This paper reports the impact that various independent variables can have on the probability of certain public interest considerations being imposed on merger cases in South Africa with the use of a quantitative logit regression model. The study sample consists of 221 mergers between 2010 and 2019, and only includes cases with PICs as conditions to merge, based on all small, intermediate, and large mergers collected from Competition Commission and Tribunal newsletters, case files and company websites, as well as the Institute for Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances. This research makes use of descriptive statistics and regression analysis from this unique database to analyse the data. The results indicate that for South Africa, the competition authorities focus on employment, supplier development fund programmes and Black economic empowerment conditions when considering which PIC to enforce on merger cases. The article contributes to the literature on competition policy and economics by adding to the minimal research already conducted and enhances our understanding of mergers with non-competition goals and the impact of these considerations in the South African merger framework.

Keywords:

• Competition policy
• public interest
• mergers
• non-competition goals

JEL CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• K21

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).