The Inconsistencies of the Inclusion of German Civil Law Notaries in the OECD PMR Indicators

This book explains how the OECD’s Product Market Regulation (PMR) Indicators treat civil law notaries. It explains why applying a pro-competition metric designed for goods and private services to German notaries – who are independent holders of a public office and integral to the preventive administration of justice – produces distorted and policy-misleading results. At its core, the book shows that civil law notaries are not market actors in the conventional sense. In Germany, notaries exercise state-delegated functions, create enforceable public deeds, safeguard the reliability of land and commercial registers, combat money laundering, and guarantee universal, affordable access to legal certainty under a fixed, socially balanced fee schedule. The analysis reconstructs the PMR methodology and demonstrates its misfit for services whose quality is defined by independence, impartiality, and legal reliability – qualities that cannot be reduced to price/quantity proxies or ranked alongside architects, estate agents, or accountants. The book is intended for policymakers, regulators, competition economists, legal scholars, ministries of justice, bar and notarial bodies, and graduate students in law and public policy.