March 1997 The major options for encouraging trade competition and banning anticompetitive practices are unlikely to have much of a downside for developing countries. Those that are most advantageous are likely to be opposed by special interest groups in industrial countries. Starting in the late 1980s, policy makers and academics began increasingly to call for the development of multilateral discipline on anticompetitive practices. Some believe that falling trade barriers must be complemented by antitrust measures to ensure that foreign competition materializes; some believe that without multilateral discipline it would be impossible to limit the use of antidumping and related policies; and some believe that the exercise of market power by global multinationals requires a global code on competition. Efforts to establish multilateral disciplines on competition have resulted only in various codes of conduct, none of them legally enforceable. But prospects for negotiating an agreement improved with the recent decision at the first ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to establish a working group on the topic. The author evaluates various options from the perspective of developing countries: agreeing to minimum standards for national antitrust laws; expanding the reach of the WTO provision on nullification and impairment to policies that restrict competition; granting the WTO a mandate to advocate competition; and doing nothing. He concludes that developing counties would benefit from and agreement that: - Bans price-fixing and market sharing. - Includes a ban on export cartels. - Initiates a process of replacing antidumping actions with enforcement of domestic competition laws. - Strengthens the WTO s mandate to advocate co nt may be quite difficult, however, as some of these elements will be opposed by various special-interest groups in industrial countries. This paper--a product of the International Trade Division, International Economics Department--draws on an earlier version of a paper presented at the seventh U.S.-Korea Academic Symposium, The Emerging WTO System and Perspectives from Asia, held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, August 28-30, 1996.

Based on a conference of national authorities and leading scholars in antitrust and competition law and policy, the text presents 20 essays which together provide an in-depth assessment of achievements and impasses, as well as a variety of possible ways forward.

Jagdish Bhagwati, the internationally renowned economist who uniquely combines a reputation as the leading scholar of international trade with a substantial presence in public policy on the important issues of the day, shines here a critical light on Preferential Trade Agreements, revealing how the rapid spread of PTAs endangers the world trading system. Numbering by now well over 300, and rapidly increasing, these preferential trade agreements, many taking the form of Free Trade Agreements, have re-created the unhappy situation of the 1930s, when world trade was undermined by discriminatory practices. Whereas this was the result of protectionism in those days, ironically it is a result of misdirected pursuit of free trade via PTAs today. The world trading system is at risk again, the author argues, and the danger is palpable. Writing with his customary wit, panache and elegance, Bhagwati documents the growth of these PTAs, the reasons for their proliferation, and their deplorable consequences which include the near-destruction of the non-discrimination which was at the heart of the postwar trade architecture and its replacement by what he has called the spaghetti bowl of a maze of preferences. Bhagwati also documents how PTAs have undermined the prospects for multilateral freeing of trade, serving as stumbling blocks, instead of building blocks, for the objective of reaching multilateral free trade. In short, Bhagwati cogently demonstrates why PTAs are Termites in the Trading System.

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