As a compact, liberal, industrialized democracy, 1980s New Zealand proved a useful place to try out the latest fads in market deregulation. This title presents a comprehensive chronicle and critical analysis of how well New Zealand's competition law fared in combatting mergers, monopolies, and cartels.

It is the thesis of this fascinating and highly instructive book on competition law that an examination of one landmark case, scenario, or 'saga' each from a range of legal systems leads to a thorough understanding of the issues informing and arising from competition policy, law, and legal practice. To that end, leading scholars from 14 jurisdictions enhance their academic authority and rigour with an element of panache to describe a particularly salient case in each of their countries, commenting in depth on the contribution of the case to the development of their particular competition law culture and to the case’s enduring significance for competition law and its enforcement from a global perspective. There are chapters for each of thirteen countries as well as the European Union, preceded by an informative and thoughtful introduction. For each landmark case selected, the legislative background, the case facts, and the legal ruling and reasoning are all minutely described, along with commentary, critique, and assessment of the case’s impact and contemporary significance. The cases cover vast swathes of the competition law territory in terms of substance and procedure, dealing with cartels, abuse of dominance, mergers, and vertical restraints, and involving diverse forms of public and private enforcement processes. Aspects covered include the following: the public interest test; bid-rigging in public procurement; the entitlement of dominant companies to compete on a level footing with other companies; the hard-to-draw line between legitimate competition and unlawful monopolizing conduct; the dangers of eclectic borrowing in the development and interpretation of competition law rules; horizontal price-fixing collusion ‘hub and spoke’ cartels; resale price maintenance agreements and the U.S. ‘rule of reason’; the increasing use of private enforcement and the right for victims of a competition law infringement to seek compensation; merger control in energy markets and the political use of merger review rules to benefit domestic firms; cooperation with criminal enforcement agencies and prosecutors; the role courts play in undertaking adequate legal supervision of competition authorities; leniency processes and obtaining access to ‘confidential’ whistleblowing documentation; imposition of administrative fines and other deterrence-based sanctions; and how the ‘consumer welfare’ standard is interpreted. More than a set of landmark case descriptions, this book, in which many chapters reflect upon recent and consider further future significant reforms, demonstrates that competition law and its enforcement processes form part of a chronological narrative, and that it is important to understand the broader legal, social, and economic context within which competition law and policy develop. This wider perspective will prove immeasurably valuable to the many practitioners, business people, jurists, and policy makers engaged in the shaping of competition law in any jurisdiction, and will moreover be essential reading for postgraduate students studying any aspects of comparative competition law enforcement.

In Australia and New Zealand, many public projects, programs and services perform well. But these cases are consistently underexposed and understudied. We cannot properly ‘see’—let alone recognise and explain—variations in government performance when media, political and academic discourses are saturated with accounts of their shortcomings and failures, but are next to silent on their achievements. Successful Public Policy: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand helps to turn that tide. It aims to reset the agenda for teaching, research and dialogue on public policy performance. This is done through a series of close-up, in-depth and carefully chosen case study accounts of the genesis and evolution of stand-out public policy achievements, across a range of sectors within Australia and New Zealand. Through these accounts, written by experts from both countries, we engage with the conceptual, methodological and theoretical challenges that have plagued extant research seeking to evaluate, explain and design successful public policy. Studies of public policy successes are rare—not just in Australia and New Zealand, but the world over. This book is embedded in a broader project exploring policy successes globally; its companion volume, Great Policy Successes (edited by Paul ‘t Hart and Mallory Compton), is published by Oxford University Press (2019).

This book is a Claeys and Casteels title, now formally part of Edward Elgar Publishing. With extensive updating in the decade since the publication of the second edition, and written by the key Commission and European Court officials in this area, as well as leading practitioners, the third edition of this unique title provides meticulous and exhaustive coverage of EU Merger Law.

This volume explores the promise and limitations of competitive market dynamics, looking at the threats to competition - cartels, agreements, monopolies, and mergers - and the laws in place across the US and European Union to safeguard the process of competition.

This collection of essays represents the first in a series of two volumes that set out to reflect the state of the art of antitrust thinking in digital markets in jurisdictions around the world. The issues it tackles are many: the role of innovation, the conundrum of big data, the evolution of media markets, and the question of whether existing antitrust tools are sufficient to deal with the challenges of digital markets. Each author tackles the overarching themes from their unique national perspective. The resulting tapestry reflects the challenges and opportunities presented by the modern digital era, viewed through the lens of competition enforcement.