Regulation and growth: Lessons from nearly 50 years of product market reforms

Business

Product market regulation reforms directly affect firm entry, innovation and reallocation, and thus productivity and economic growth. This column leverages the 2025 update of the OECD Energy, Transport and Communications Regulation indicator to show that anticompetitive regulations in upstream sectors curb long-run economic performance in downstream sectors. Across the OECD, deregulation in network industries between 1980 and 2023 raised labour productivity by about 5%, with larger gains in