Indeed, modern debt management techniques have tended towards very predictable issuance strategies suggesting that there are benefits from some degree of co-ordination. In Japan, rapidly rising public debt levels make efficient debt management increasingly important. Costs in Japan are magnified by the fact that the government bond market is illiquid compared with those in other major industrial countries. To shed more light on these issues the OECD, in collaboration with Member governments, has constructed a detailed database covering both economy-wide and sectoral laws and regulations in each country. A comparison across countries shows that there is no single country that has the most, or the least, anti-competitive regulatory structure on every measure.
Some patterns emerge, however.
Looking at inward-oriented policies, countries that have burdensome administrative regulations also tend to have more restrictive regulations on economic issues such as prices, ownership and legal barriers to competition. There is also some correlation between the overall degree of state ownership and the extent to which competition is curbed by barriers to entry. The OECD work shows that although there is a growing consensus on the desirability of strengthening the forces of competition in product markets both domestically and across borders, there remain relevant differences between countries in the degree to which this has translated into actual practices. Another conclusion is that there are often synergies between reform efforts across different types of regulations.