Propuestas de reforma del modelo institucional de la CNMC

Zusammenfassung

This paper analyses from a critical perspective the institutional design of the Spanish competition and regulatory authority, the CNMC. First, the most usual criticisms about the legal design and about the functioning of the authority are assessed in order to answer two questions: does the new model work?; do the current problems justify a radical transformation of the model, as some political parties are proposing? The paper shows that the origin of the problems cannot be traced back to the integration of competition and regulatory supervision, but to the deficient operation of the CNMC’s Board, which is directly related to the appointment of the members of the Board by the previous government, and also to important defects in the institutional design unrelated to its integrated nature, such as the separation of President and Vice-president in the two Chambers of the Board, and also the lack of budgetary autonomy, especially regarding human resources. Second, the article studies in detail several proposals to solve the current situation, on the one hand through new appointments to the Board, and on the other hand through several changes in the CNMC’s legal design. In the author’s opinion these reforms would be a more proportionate solution to the current problems of the institution and would avoid the high cost of a new institutional reform barely three years after its creation.