Browsing by Author "Morris, Ronan Mitchell"

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    The predictive power of public interest concerns relative to competition concerns in South African merger control
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Morris, Ronan Mitchell; Boshoff, Willem; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Dept. of Economics.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY: This thesis seeks to ascertain the relative importance of public interest concerns and competition concerns in predicting South African merger adjudication decisions. In particular, the thesis empirically tests the hypothesis that public interest concerns have become more important in driving merger intervention than competition concerns. While earlier research suggests a statistically significant relationship between public interest concerns and the conditional approval of mergers, the relative importance of public interest and competition concerns as drivers of the merger adjudication process in South Africa has not received empirical attention. Such an empirical study is timeous in the light of policy attempts to provide clarity on the role of public interest concerns, including through the publication of guidelines. The thesis also posits two secondary, and related, hypotheses. First, that the South African Competition Commission has become increasingly interventionist since the 2018 amendments to the Competition Act, ceteris paribus. Second, that all public interest concerns are not treated equally, i.e. that public interest concerns vary in their impact on merger intervention. The thesis relies on publicly available merger data released by the South African Competition Commission in 2022. It includes over three thousand unique merger cases, and covers a wide array of variables that influence merger decisions. The methodology in this paper is derived from the machine learning literature. The specific algorithm employed is that of a random forest model, which produces a variable importance plot and allows for partial probability analysis. These measures provide the empirical basis for evaluation the stated hypotheses. The thesis concludes that public interest concerns are more important for predicting merger adjudication decisions than individual competition concerns. It is noteworthy that, on average, small business concerns, BBBEE concerns, and concerns around the ability of national firms to compete in international markets all raise the probability of merger intervention by more than raising three separate competition concerns. It is further shown than the Commission has become increasingly interventionist after the 2018 amendments to the Act, ceteris paribus. Finally, it is concluded that public interest concerns should not be treated as a uniform group when estimating their effects on the adjudication of a merger, as they have distinct effects on the probability of intervention.