The authors survey national competition policies and the issues they raise for international trade and investment. The book includes detailed recommendations for international agreement on minimum standards in those competition-policy measures that affect the ability of foreign firms to contest markets. These standards could be negotiated and implemented bilaterally, regionally, and globally at the World Trade Organisation.
There is growing consensus among international trade negotiators and policymakers that a prime area for future multilateral discussion is competition policy. Competition policy includes antitrust policy (including merger regulation and control) but is often extended to include international trade measures and other policies that affect the structure, conduct, and performance of individual industries. This study includes country studies of competition policy in Western Europe, North America, and the Far East (with a focus on Japan) in the light of increasingly globalized activities of business firms. Areas where there are major differences in philosophy, policy, or practice are identified, with emphasis on those differences that could lead to economic costs and international friction. Alternatives for eliminating these costs and frictions are discussed, including unilateral policy changes, bilateral or multilateral harmonization of policies, and creation of new international regimes to supplement or replace national or regional regimes.
This book is a welcome and timely addition to the library of materials exploring the implications of the move from internationalisation of trade towards globalisation. Michael Hutchings, European Competition Law Review This book provides an excellent introduction to the difficult and important issues surrounding international trade and competition policy. Douglas A. Irwin, Dartmouth College, US The opening up of world markets, rapid growth of trade and foreign direct investment create manifold problems for competition policy. Thus, international mergers may have adverse effects on many countries, international cartels may carve up world markets and dominant firms may seek to maintain their global position by exclusionary conduct. These problems have been recognised for more than half a century and some attempts have been made internationally to address them, so far with limited success. This progressive book seeks to explore the problems and concerns that globalisation has created for competition policy. The book begins by setting out the principles of competition and trade policies, and then goes on to address the impact of market globalisation on what are usually thought of as traditional antitrust concerns. These include the analysis of the difficulties arising from collusion and other restrictive practices, government sponsored voluntary co-operation , vertical restrictions and market access, pricing strategies of dominant firms and international mergers, all illustrated with a number of prominent case studies. The author concludes with an illuminating discussion on the feasibility of international co-operation on competition policy, the faltering progress that has been made so far and the prospects for future advances. This comprehensive volume will prove to be an invaluable resource to students and scholars of law and economics. It will also find wide appeal amongst researchers, policy makers and practitioners with an interest in industrial organisation, antitrust policy and globalisation.
"Scherer has demonstrated yet again why he is one of the world's leading antitrust scholars. This book provides a much needed, in-depth study of the role of national antitrust policies in a global economy. The Antitrust Division wrestles with this question daily and this book provides a guide to us and to all those interested in antitrust policy with some important answers."—Anne K. Bingaman, Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice. As global markets for goods, services and financial assets have become increasingly integrated, national governments no longer have as much control over economic markets. With the completion of the Uruguay Round of the GATT talks, the world economy has entered a fresh phase requiring different rules and different levels of international cooperation. Policies once thought to be entirely domestic and appropriately determined by national political institutions, are now subject to international constraints. Cogent analysis of this deeper integration of the world economy, and guidelines for government policies, are urgent priorities. This series aims to meet these needs over a range of 21 books by some of the world's leading economists, political scientists, foreign policy specialists and government officials. A volume of Brookings' Integrating National Economies Series
The fast-evolving relationship between the promotion of welfare-enhancing competition and the balanced protection of intellectual property (IP) rights has attracted the attention of policymakers, analysts and scholars. This interest is inevitable in an environment that lays ever greater emphasis on the management of knowledge and innovation and on mechanisms to ensure that the public derives the expected social and economic benefits from this innovation and the spread of knowledge. This book looks at the positive linkage between IP and competition in jurisdictions around the world, surveying developments and policy issues from an international and comparative perspective. It includes analysis of key doctrinal and policy issues by leading academics and practitioners from around the globe and a cutting-edge survey of related developments across both developed and developing economies. It also situates current policy developments at the national level in the context of multilateral developments, at WIPO, WTO and elsewhere.
Integration into global markets can improve the efficiency of the Argentinian economy, providing opportunities for private investment to flourish and for the associated benefits to accrue to consumers. Among many policies that are important for integrating into the global economy, particularly relevant are trade, investment, and competition policies. They all share a common attribute: the capacity to shape the incentives of firms to improve resource allocation and to strengthen productivity while integrating into international markets. Once properly combined, investment, trade, and competition polices have mutually reinforcing relationships in the sense that growth dividends stemming from reforms in one policy area are reinforced when properly combined with reforms in the other two. Against this backdrop, this report follows a three-pronged approach. It presents a set of robust empirical analyses †“ drawing from both general and partial equilibrium exercises - to assess the potential impacts from trade, competition, and investment policy reforms. It offers a new comparative review of international experience with structural microeconomic reform programs to bring insights for Argentina’s design and sequencing of such reforms. Finally, it presents individual reform recommendations for each institution in charge of the three respective policy areas in an integrated step-by-step framework from the firm perspective to illustrate the critical challenges to investment and internationalization for Argentinian firms.
The subject of this study is the way that finns, industries, and nations organize their relationships with one another in order to engage in international business. To the casual observer, the processes of buying and selling, borrowing and lending, investing and receiving investment returns may seem much the same, whether they occur within a single country or between and among businesses in different political jurisdictions. In fact, however, business contacts between firms or individuals in different coun tries are significantly different from their domestic counterparts. Not only do international buyers and sellers, borrowers and lenders, investors and earnings recipients often use different languages and currencies, they also frequently operate under different basic rules governing contracts, accounting practices, and dispute-settlement arrangements; and they are subject to different tax systems. Most important, they may require explicit pennission, or at least facilitating arrangements, from their respective governments in order to engage in any economic contact whatsoever. It may well be that, as Adam Smith believed, there is "a certain propensity in human nature . . . to truck, barter, and exchange one 1, p. 17); but the fact is that most im thing for another" (1776, vol. portant markets and business relationships do not simply appear and evolve as natural phenomena. In fact, they are created by human effort and are highly organized, and international business relationships are the most highly organized of all.
