Development of an index of reserves of activities. This sub-section describes how the index of reserves of activities (“RA Index”) has been constructed. The index maps the value of particular professions, depending on whether they are non-reserved, subject to a shared or an exclusive reserve of activities on a 0-1 scale, where 0 indicates no reservation of activity, and 1 is the highest degree of restrictiveness, namely the reservation of a task to a sole profession. For each task and subsector, data has been collected through the legal inventory as to whether the task was non-reserved (denoted by “0”), an exclusive reserved task (“1”), or a shared reserve task (“2”). More detailed information has also been obtained in respect of the number of professions that are “sharers” of any one reserved activity or task67. When two or more professions have a shared reserve of activities, there is, all other things being equal, less restrictiveness than in the case of an exclusive task reserved to a single profession, so it is mapped to a value of less than 1. Likewise, the higher the number of professions sharing a reserved task, the lower the index value should be. The basic premise is that if several professionals share a given reserved task or activity, then this is an indication of a lower level of market restrictiveness comparatively speaking than a reserved task shared by only two professionals. Of course, in practice, the nature of market entry barriers, the structure of the market and the level of market openness or monopoly will vary, but the index will at least provide a quantitative basis for comparison. When multiple professions have access to a shared task, the degree of restrictiveness is nevertheless considered to be considerably different from the situation of non-reservation: for this reason, a lower minimum threshold value for shared reserved tasks of 0.5 has been set. The mapping of task reservation to index value therefore adopts the following schedule:
