Disclaimer: the figure will not look good on mobiles/small screens.
The Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) carries out market studies and investigations to make sure that particular markets are operating well.
Using data from the CMA’s website, I have compiled the figure below. It shows all the ‘markets’ cases listed on the website (aside from one which did not appear to have an obvious start date).
For more recent cases, market studies that became investigations are shown as one bar (as there is only one CMA case page). For older cases, the initial Office of Fair Trading (“OFT”) review and subsequent Competition Commission (“CC”) investigation appear as separate bars (because there are separate case pages on the CMA’s website). The annotations can be clicked to go to each case page.
The bars are coloured by the market sector being investigated (e.g. financial services). Some studies/investigations overlap market sectors (e.g. the online platforms and digital advertising market study falls under ‘communications’ and ‘recreation and leisure’). Each unique combination is given a different colour. The sectors are listed below:
- Building and construction - Communications - Communications, Electronics, Recreation and leisure - Communications, Financial services, Recreation and leisure, Utilities - Communications, Recreation and leisure - Distribution and service industries - Energy - Energy, Utilities - Financial services - Financial services, Telecommunications - Healthcare and medical equipment - Healthcare and medical equipment, Public markets - Oil and gas refining and petrochemicals - Pharmaceuticals - Public markets - Retail and wholesale - Telecommunications - Transport - Various
Last updated: 4 July 2021
The underlying data used can be found here. The R code for downloading the data from the CMA website, and plotting the graph can be found here.