Competition, competitiveness, innovation and growth are inherently linked. This book covers the main ideas underlying competitiveness and its applications, drawing lessons for developing economies and relevant policy recommendations.

Competitive markets are now established in most successful economies but the question of what competition is and what it means for policy in developing countries is often overlooked. This book provides a refreshing and critical examination of the issues relating to market competition and competition policy. The book discusses competition from different theoretical perspectives and examines the implications these viewpoints have for policy. The contributors assess competitiveness in domestic markets and the impact of foreign competition. They also review the experiences of a range of countries in developing competition policy and examine both the strengths and weaknesses of these policies. Written in a non-technical manner, Competitive Advantage and Competition Policy in Developing Countries is addressed to policymakers, as well as academics, concerned with regulation and competition. It will also be of interest to regulators in dedicated agencies such as utility regulators, competition agencies and those dealing with regulatory impact assessment.

This book brings together perspectives of development economics and law to tackle the relationship between competition law enforcement and economic development. It addresses the question of whether, and how, competition law enforcement helps to promote economic growth and development. This question is highly pertinent for developing countries largely because many developing countries have only adopted competition law in recent years: about thirty jurisdictions had in place a competition law in the early 1980s, and there are now more than 130 competition law regimes across the world, of which many are developing countries. The book proposes a customized approach to competition law enforcement for developing countries, set against the background of the academic and policy debate concerning convergence of competition law. The implicit premise of convergence is that there may exist one, or a few, correct approaches to competition law enforcement, which in most cases emanate from developed jurisdictions, that are applicable to all. This book rejects this assumption and argues that developing countries ought to tailor competition law enforcement to their own economic and political circumstances. In particular, it suggests how competition law enforcement can better incorporate development concerns without causing undue dilution of its traditional focus on protecting consumer welfare. It proposes ways in which approaches to competition law enforcement need to be adjusted to reflect the special economic characteristics of developing country economies and the more limited enforcement capacity of developing country competition authorities. Finally, it also addresses the long-running debate concerning the desirability and viability of industrial policy for developing countries. The author would like to acknowledge the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong for its generous support. The work in this book was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Project No. HKU 742412H).

Interest in U.S. trade policy has been stimulated in recent years by the massive American trade deficit, by the belief that intervention by foreign governments in international markets has given other countries a competitive edge over the United States, and by concern about the increase in protectionism among industrial countries. In turn, major analytical developments in international economics have revolutionized trade theory, broadening its scope both by introducing in a more formal manner such concepts as imperfect competition, increasing returns, product differentiation, and learning effects and by including the study of political and economic factors that shape trade policy decisions. This collection of papers—the result of a conference held by the NBER—applies these "new" trade theories to existing world cases and also presents complementary empirical studies that are grounded in more traditional trade theories. The volume is divided into four parts. The papers in part 1 consider the problem of imperfect competition, empirically assessing the economic effect of various trade policies introduced in industries in which the "new" trade theory seems to apply. Those in part 2 isolate the effects of protection from the influences of the many economic changes that accompany actual periods of protection and also examine how the effects from exogenous changes in economic conditions vary with the form of protection. Part 3 provides new empirical evidence on the effect of foreign production by a country's firms on the home country's exports. Finally, in part 4, two key bilateral issues are analyzed: recent U.S.-Japanese trade tensions and the incident involving the threat of the imposition of countervailing duties by the United States on Canadian softwood lumber.

The vast majority of the countries in the world are developing countries—there are only thirty-four OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries—and yet there is a serious dearth of attention to developing countries in the international and comparative law scholarship, which has been preoccupied with the United States and the European Union. Competition Law and Development investigates whether or not the competition law and policy transplanted from Europe and the United States can be successfully implemented in the developing world or whether the developing-world experience suggests a need for a different analytical framework. The political and economic environment of developing countries often differs significantly from that of developed countries in ways that may have serious implications for competition law enforcement. The need to devote greater attention to developing countries is also justified by the changing global economic reality in which developing countries—especially China, India, and Brazil—have emerged as economic powerhouses. Together with Russia, the so-called BRIC countries have accounted for thirty percent of global economic growth since the term was coined in 2001. In this sense, developing countries deserve more attention not because of any justifiable differences from developed countries in competition law enforcement, either in theoretical or practical terms, but because of their sheer economic heft. This book, the second in the Global Competition Law and Economics series, provides a number of viewpoints of what competition law and policy mean both in theory and practice in a development context.

What are the normative foundations of competition law? That is the question at the heart of this book. Leading scholars consider whether this branch of law serves just one or more than one goal, and if it serves to protect unfettered competition as such, how this goal relates to other objectives such as the promotion of economic welfare. The book brings together contributions on the relevance of different welfare standards, on the concept of 'freedom to compete' and on distributional fairness as a goal of competition law. Moreover, it discusses the relationship to other legal goals such as mar.