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.

A key factor in the emerging relationship between law and economic globalization is how global competition now shapes economies and societies. Competition law is provided by those players that have sufficient 'power' to apply their laws transnationally. This book examines this important and controversial aspect of globalization.

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.

Over the last three decades, the field of antitrust law has grown increasingly prominent, and more than one hundred countries have enacted competition law statutes. As competition law expands to jurisdictions with very different economic, social, cultural, and institutional backgrounds, the debates over its usefulness have similarly evolved. This book, the first in a new series on global competition law, critically assesses the importance of competition law, its development and modern practice, and the global limits that have emerged. This volume will be a key resource to both scholars and practitioners interested in antitrust, competition law, economics, business strategy, and administrative sciences.

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.

The food industry is a notoriously complex economic sector that has not received the attention it deserves within legal scholarship. Production and distribution of food is complex because of its polycentric character (as it operates at the intersection of different public policies) and its dynamic evolution and transformation in the last few decades (from technological and governance perspectives). This volume introduces the global value chain approach as a useful way to analyse competition law and applies it to the operations of food chains and the challenges of their regulation. Together, the chapters not only provide a comprehensive mapping of a vast comparative field, but also shed light on the intricacies of the various policies and legal fields in operation. The book offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for competition authorities, companies and academics, and fills a massive gap in the competition policy literature dealing with global value chains and food.

This is the first book to provide a systematic treatment of the economics of antitrust (or competition policy) in a global context. It draws on the literature of industrial organisation and on original analyses to deal with such important issues as cartels, joint-ventures, mergers, vertical contracts, predatory pricing, exclusionary practices, and price discrimination, and to formulate policy implications on these issues. The interaction between theory and practice is one of the main features of the book, which contains frequent references to competition policy cases and a few fully developed case studies. The treatment is written to appeal to practitioners and students, to lawyers and economists. It is not only a textbook in economics for first year graduate or advanced undergraduate courses, but also a book for all those who wish to understand competition issues in a clear and rigorous way. Exercises and some solved problems are provided.