Competition Law
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Description
Competition law regulates business practices and transactions that create or abuse market power and interfere with the free play of market forces. In the United States, this body of law is called antitrust law. The law was enacted at the end of the nineteenth century in response to the formation of trusts by Rockefeller, Morgan, and others to control major sectors of the American economy, such as railroads, steel, oil, farm machinery, sugar, and banking. Until the end of World War II, the United States alone was a prominent enforcer of antitrust law. At the end of the war, in connection with US assistance programmes, Germany and Japan adopted antitrust law as an antidote to political authoritarianism. In the 1950s, when the states of Western Europe created a common market designed to eliminate government-imposed barriers to trade, the blueprint included a common competition policy to facilitate the creation of a common market and, in particular, to prevent a redivision of markets by commercial actors. In the late 1980s Communism fell in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, and the newly democratic states adopted market systems. The economic reforms included adoption of competition laws in order to check abuse of private power, to limit privilege, and to open markets to trade and competition. The end of the Uruguay Round, with yet lower barriers to world trade, increased the visibility of remaining trade barriers and fuelled the demand for open markets free from private as well as public restraints. Approximately 100 countries now have competition laws, most of which were adopted since 1990. These include South Korea, South Africa, Nigeria, Zambia, Vietnam, Peru, Barbados, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Malta, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Jamaica, to name a few. Competition policy has taken a prominent place among international economic concerns. Markets commonly transcend national borders, raising the question whether there is a need for a supranational framework. Multinational networks and other fora for cooperation across frontiers attempt to bring coherence to market problems of global dimension. This chapter explores, first, the origins and evolution of competition law, second, the reach of national law to foreign actors and transactions, and third, substantive and procedural rules of the American and European systems. The last two sections of the chapter explore bilateral and multilateral initiatives to improve the competition process in a global economy.
Source Publication
International Economic Law
Source Editors/Authors
Andreas F. Lowenfeld
Publication Date
2008
Edition
2
Recommended Citation
Fox, Eleanor M., "Competition Law" (2008). Faculty Chapters. 1233.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1233
