Economic Policy Reform Strategies for International Regulations on Competition

There is general agreement between states that the international cooperation of competition authorities and courts should be improved. A general prohibition of hard-core cartels seems to find consensus as well, this being perceptible in the meetings of the WTO working group. At the time of writing, the USA is still contesting the WTO regulations for competition even though the Report of the International Competition Policy Advisory Committee (ICPAC)1 had already, in April 2000, in large part established the necessity for international rules on competition owing to increasing globalization. The arguments brought by the USA were threadbare at best. One argument was that the WTO has insufficient instruments for intervention and sanctioning, and that US courts could therefore better enforce an international competition policy. Another was that WTO panels lacked the technical expertise necessary to implement an international competition policy. In fact, the USA argued that international competition regulations were unnecessary and their implementation too costly. The USA suspects that their influence on international competition policy could be reduced if there were international rules or if third parties could exert influence. The main fear in this context for the USA is a weakening of its own anti-dumping laws.2