| Popis: |
The Thai competition regime suffers from a severe lack of transparency in decision-making process. Legal requirements for decision making do not guarantee the right to be given reasons to the public. Instead, they only protect the public’s right to be informed. As a consequence, governmental entities rarely provide reasons regarding their decision making to the public, because they do not have to. They only provide what the laws require them to do -informing the public the results of their decisions. This is particularly true in the competition law regime. While most of governmental commissions are reluctant to provide more transparency in their decision makings, the Thai competition commission (TCC) is active in ensuring that they would not provide any other transparency than what the laws require them to do, i.e. the outcomes of competition decisions. Because of that, the public misses opportunity to learn about criteria and rationales of competition decisions. The literature suggests that to achieve better transparency one needs to access adequate and relevant information. Regarding transparency in laws, one needs to access legal precedents to know how the laws apply and learn from them. Regarding transparency in competition law, one needs to access competition law precedent to learn the criteria and rationales of competition cases. Therefore, transparency is the key to better policy learning. To achieve better policy learning for Thai competition law, the public needs to access adequate and relevant competition legal precedent, containing criterion and rationales of competition decisions as provided by a properly transparent regime. The Thesis begins by identifying the lack of transparency and policy learning in Thai competition decision making (Chapter 1). It moves on to discuss the linkage among transparency, legal precedent, and policy learning (Chapter 2). It has shown that all three are dependant to each other. By providing transparency, legal precedent and policy learning will follow. The Thesis goes on to identify the missing opportunity to establish legal tests as a policy learning in T&B decisions (Chapter 3 and 4). Then it suggests new legal frameworks and additional enforcement mechanism to introduce more transparency to Thai competition decision making (Chapter 5). |
