In the classic cartel, supposed competitors meet in the proverbial smoke-filled hotel room and agree to fix prices at supra-competitive levels. Even though the “agreement” is unlikely to be legally binding on the parties (i.e., the agreement could not be enforced against one of the cartelists that began to “cheat” by offering lower prices), virtually all modern economies would treat such a cartel as unlawful under their national antitrust laws. Despite the effectiveness of leniency programs in encouraging confessions from cartel members, there are still cartels (both domestic and international) that operate under a cloak of secrecy, and therefore governments must continue to use more conventional tools to seek them out and prosecute them. Sometimes these traditional investigatory tools will yield the confession or the hot documents that will make prosecution easy, but not always. So the question arises: in the absence of a video-taped cartel meeting, a cooperating participant, or incriminating documents, can a cartel be successfully prosecuted based primarily on “circumstantial” evidence? However, it is not just a question of what kind of circumstantial evidence can be used to establish the existence of a hard-core cartel - that question might best be described in these circumstances as akin to an economic detective story. A more complicated substantive question underlies the effort to describe the type and quantity of the circumstantial evidence necessary to obtain a successful prosecution, namely, what precisely do we mean to include under the category of an illegal “agreement” or “conspiracy” or “concerted practice?” The plan of this chapter is to begin by describing how the U.S. treats classic cartel behavior when proof of the existence of a cartel agreement is not an issue. Then we turn to the task of establishing the existence of an illegal agreement primarily or entirely through circumstantial evidence. This will quickly get us into the question of what constitutes an unlawful agreement under U.S. law and in particular, the recently renewed debate about whether classic oligopoly behavior can be prosecuted as an unlawful agreement. In the process, we will refer to how similar issues are dealt with in other jurisdictions, most notably the European Union.

In the era of globalization, trade policy has become a key development tool and expanding exports a major policy objective for developing countries. However, pressures for protectionism are threatening to reverse the gains. The surge of anti-dumping practices in the 1990s in many countries have triggered an intense debate on the anti-dumping agreement and its implementation. This volume analyses the importance of anti-dumping from a developing country's perspective. The author investigates the use of anti-dumping in a comparative framework and reviews the genesis and evolution of the Agreement and its legal provisions. She further discusses the economic and non-economic justifications of anti-dumping use and empirically analyses the macro-economic factors motivating countries to use anti-dumping. Finally she examines the wide-ranging proposals to reform the WTO anti-dumping code. The analysis brings out a bias against developing countries and stresses the need for fundamental reform of current anti-dumping rules. The author also reflects on plausible approaches to refine existing provisions and explores the possibility of reform by including a Public Interest Test. She suggests updating the special and differential treatment provisions to remedy existing imbalances.

The WTO Secretariat reports that during the period from 1995 to June 30, 2007 WTO members initiated 3097 anti-dumping investigations. Of these, 474 were put forward by India, which made it the largest user of this measure among WTO Members. The traditional argument of developing countries was that loopholes or absence of clear definitions in the anti-dumping rules have increased the possibility of abuses and discretionary practices against them. Now, many developing countries like India have become frequent users of this measure. For a better understanding of the various provisions of the WTO's Anti-dumping Agreement (ADA) a critical investigation of the resulting jurisprudence is a necessity. To that end, this timely work has a fivefold aim: and• To explore the jurisprudence that has emerged around the anti-dumping regime and how it affected developing countries; and• To assess how effectively and to what extent the WTO's Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) is able to analyze the violations of ADA provisions; and• To examine domestic compliance with DSB decisions; and• To study the Indian cases which come before the nation's Customs, Excise andamp; Sales Tax Appellate Tribunal, various High Courts and the Supreme Court of India; and and• To offer recommendations for the improvement of the anti-dumping regime from a developing country perspective.

This volume contains a collection of studies examining trade-related issues negotiated in regional trade agreements (RTAs) and how RTAs are related to the WTO's rules. While previous work has focused on subsets of RTAs, these studies are based on what is probably the largest dataset used to date, and highlight key issues that have been negotiated in all RTAs notified to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). New rules within RTAs are compared to rules agreed upon by WTO members. The extent of their divergences and the potential implications for parties to RTAs, as well as for WTO members that are not parties to RTAs, are examined. This volume makes an important contribution to the current debate on the role of the WTO in regulating international trade and how WTO rules relate to new rules being developed by RTAs.

The status of agreement is a core issue in current morphological and syntactic theory. The collection of papers in this volume focuses on important issues, such as the nature of the relation between syntax and morphology in determining agreement relations; whether and which syntactic configurations are relevant for determining agreement; the relevance of verbal agreement for the purposes of EPP; the inquiry into the existence of connections between verbal and DP-internal agreement; on the morphological and syntactic distinction of person, number and gender agreement; how and why AGREE and Spec,head relations trigger different agreement effects; and the type of relation that exists between head-movement and morphological agreement. The data collected come from a wide variety of languages and the studies presented discuss innovative and thought-provoking ideas for dealing with agreement phenomena.

This book describes the role of Japanese contract law in protecting the distributor against unilateral terminations of distribution agreements. Based primarily on Japanese language legal material.