In July 2021, President Biden’s Executive Order on “Promoting Competition in the American Economy” set in motion a “whole-of-government” approach to antitrust enforcement that was broadly skeptical of industry concentration. That claim of increasing market concentration was dubious, as Director of Competition Policy Fred Ashton showed in previous research based on the 2017 Economic Census. In an update to that research using newly released data, Ashton finds that industry concentration has remained stable and has not departed from the norm of the past two decades.

He concludes:

There is a lack of evidence to support the claim that industries are becoming more concentrated and, if left unchecked, the largest firms will exert some level of monopolist power. Indeed, the data from the Economic Census show that average concentration ratios have remained largely unchanged over the past 20 years and the share of highly concentrated firms remained muted.

While the definition of a “market” is undoubtedly fluid and unlikely to be captured perfectly by the NAICS definitions, these data show that competitive markets (low concentration) are the predominant landscape for most industries.

Read the analysis.