Established in 2006, The Israeli Institute for Economic Planning (“IEP”) is a non-partisan, non-profit organization, dedicated to promoting Israel’s economy as a free-market competitive economy.

IEP's mission is to identify major barriers and market failings that significantly impede entrepreneurship, innovation and growth (such as redundant bureaucracy and unfair competition), and to offer practical solutions that will lead to significant long-term changes and improvements.

For many years, the Israeli economy has been highly concentrated and dominated by monopolies. These forces often rely on outdated laws and regulations that work to their advantage, and harm the public in various aspects: high cost of living, high barriers to entry of new enterprises, adversely affecting growth and entrepreneurship (in particular in the small and medium size business segments) and causing limited competition.  

In this environment, it is clear why Israel’s economy is characterized by a high cost of living, uncompetitive capital markets, cross-sector corruption, and dominant labor unions capable of paralyzing the economy's gates of export and import and block significant reforms. The weak governance and limited Knesset’s supervision tend to preserve this “status quo”.

IEP constantly works to shape a more competitive economic structure, open markets to competition, remove barriers, increase transparency and fight market failures. This involves changing the 'genetic code' of the economic culture in Israel, identifying and exposing problematic mechanisms of wealth distribution and moving away from protectionism and nepotism.

At the same time, IEP works with state institutions, encouraging them to remove redundant bureaucracy barriers to create a better regulation environment, boost growth and competition engines and provide economic certainty required for the success of these objectives.

To advance our vision, we work through different channels, create a solid research infrastructure as a base for our activity, collaborate with civic and research institutions, raise issues through public discussion forums and offer solutions to relevant decision-makers and elected officials across the political spectrum.

These goals are reflected in all of IEP's activities, starting from the selection of the research projects through the design of the practical research method and ending with the drafting of practical recommendations and solutions, including required legislation and regulatory decisions.

IEP Team


Competition in the Israeli Banking System

In June 2015, Mr. Dror Strum, IEP's CEO, was appointed as the Head of the Committee for Increasing Competition in the Israeli Banking and Financial services. The Committee's recommendations led to a structural reform, adopted by the Knesset in the Increasing Competition and Reducing Concentration in the Banking Market Law, enacted in 2017 (also known as the Strum legislation). Pursuant to this legislation, the banking and credit card markets are undergoing numerous changes, including the structural separation of Credit Cards companies from the big banks (Poalim and Leumi). All these changes are likely to increase the competition in the provision of credit starting in 2021-2022.

Cleaning up corruption in local government

For over two years, the IEP has been conducting an empirical extensive research project on corruption in local government, focusing on past cases of proven corruption in numerous local authorities over the last decade. The findings are relatively surprising and myth breaking. The IEP is currently working on recommendations that will not just narrow down corruption by means of technology, sophisticated enforcement measures and other structural changes but also increase the efficiency of the local municipalities. In the run-up to the local elections, we launched a social media campaign that provided information about the spread of corruption in the local government which was aimed to raise awareness regarding the extent of the phenomenon and the damages it creates.

Amendment to the Antitrust Law - The reform that transformed the Antitrust Authority to the Competition Authority

On December 25, 2018, the Economics Affairs Committee in the Israeli parliament (the "Knesset"), approved the reform in the Restrictive Trade Practices Law that is expected to transform the Israeli Antitrust Authority to Competition Authority. This reform, which was largely supported by the IEP which proposed a number of improvements that were adopted, granted the Competition regulator the authority to exercise its powers to dominant firms, even when these companies control less than 50% of the market in which they operate. This was a major step towards increasing the enforcement of the law on dominant firms and bringing Israel concentrated economy in line with international enforcement practices and norms.

All Achievements