Competition Policy and Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 1 (No Poverty): The Role of Mergers and Acquisitions Adjudications in South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT South Africa faces persistently high poverty and inequality alongside a highly concentrated economic structure, raising questions about whether merger control, especially public‐interest provisions, can contribute to poverty reduction. However, empirical evidence directly linking merger adjudication outcomes to poverty remains limited. This study examines how merger adjudications influence poverty incidence and poverty depth in South Africa, focusing on cumulative approved mergers (CMA), the share approved with conditions, and the share approved with barriers. Using household panel data from National Income Dynamics Survey (NIDS) Waves 3–5 (2012–2017) merged with Competition Commission merger records, and provincial panel data for 2010–2022 from Quantec, the study estimates poverty incidence with logit models and poverty depth with fixed effects (FE) and Heckman selection, complemented by province‐level FE, IV–FE and Driscoll–Kraay corrections for endogeneity and cross‐sectional dependence. The results show that merger activity is related to poverty incidence at the micro level, while conditions provide only weak mitigation and do not robustly reduce poverty depth. At the macro level, mean income reduces poverty and inequality increases poverty across poverty lines. Conditional approvals are associated with lower poverty headcounts, especially at lower‐bound and food poverty lines, whereas barrier‐related outcomes are linked to higher poverty incidence in models correcting for endogeneity. The findings support strengthening the targeting, enforceability and ex‐post monitoring of merger conditions, with particular attention to essential‐goods sectors and vulnerable consumers, and caution against reliance on barriers without complementary protections.