Americans have long appealed to images of free competition in calling for free enterprise, freedom of contract, free labor, free trade, and free speech. This imagery has retained its appeal in myriad aspects of public policy--for example, Senator Sherman's Anti-Trust Act of 1890, Justice Holmes's metaphorical marketplace of ideas, and President Reagan's rhetoric of deregulation. In Competition Policy in America, 1888-1992, Rudolph Peritz explores the durability of free competition imagery by tracing its influences on public policy. Looking at congressional debates and hearings, administrative agency activities, court opinions, arguments of counsel, and economic, legal, and political scholarship, he finds that free competition has actually evoked two different visions--freedom not only from oppressive government, but also from private economic power. He shows how the discourse of free competition has mediated between commitments to individual liberty and rough equality--themselves unstable over time. This rhetorical approach allows us to understand, for example, that the Reagan and Carter programs of deregulation, both inspired by the rhetoric of free competition, were driven by fundamentally different visions of political economy. Peritz's historical inquiry into competition policy as a series of government directives, inspired by two complex yet distinct and sometimes contradictory visions of free competition, provides an indispensable framework for understanding modern political economy-- whether political campaign finance reform, corporate takeover regulation, or current attitudes toward the New Deal Legacy. Competition Policy in America will be of great interest to lawyers, historians, economists, sociologists, and policy makers in both government and business.

First Published in 2001. This volume considers the impact of competition policy on economic behaviour in the world's two largest economic areas.

Providing one of the first studies to explore the topic, the authors trace the development of competition policy in Latin America, where that policy stands today, and how it may be reconceptualized and deployed as a tool for consolidating the region's economic future."--BOOK JACKET.

Contains the results of peer reviews of the competition law and policies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Argentina.

This book offers an unparalleled analysis of the emerging law and economics of competition policy in Latin America. Nearly all Latin American countries now have competition laws and agencies to enforce them. Yet, these laws and agencies are relatively young. The relative youth of Latin American competition agencies and the institutional and political environment in which they operate limit the ability of agencies to effectively address anti-competitive conduct. Competition policy is a tool to overcome anti-market traditions in Latin America. Effective competition policy is critical to assisting in the growth of Latin American economies, their global competitiveness, and improving the welfare of domestic consumers. This book provides new region specific insights on how to better achieve these aims. This authoritative volume will be of particular interest to competition agencies, academics in law, economics and Latin American Studies, practitioners around the world in the areas of antitrust and competition policy, policymakers, and journalists.

The Latin American countries, both individually and as a community, are poised to become increasingly important in the international recognition and enforcement of competition law. Recent policy developments in the region are particularly instructive on cross-border mergers and international cartel investigations. Although this book’s focus is on Latin America, its in-depth exploration of areas such as information exchange among competition authorities, compliance, settlements and remedies are of great value and interest to competition lawyers and policymakers worldwide. Including numerous recent cases and best practice indicators, the contributors ̄ competition authority officials, practitioners, academics and economists ̄ cover such topics and issues as the following: • antitrust compliance programs; • competition advocacy; • bid rigging in public procurement; • predatory pricing; • use of indirect evidence in investigations; • shareholders’ damages claims; • relation between antitrust and intellectual property; and • merger control. There are country-specific chapters on particular developments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico and Paraguay. Highlighting the importance of international competition regulatory cooperation, this insightful book offers both practical guidance and food for thought to lawyers at national competition authorities, corporate counsel, and other competition law practitioners and academics.

In the past few years, Latin American countries have taken giant steps to reposition their competition authorities in the global antitrust arena, granting them much greater autonomy both domestically and internationally. This is an updated edition of the first book that offered an in-depth analysis of this complex scenario. The first part of the book includes more general chapters written by leading experts on a variety of relevant topics analyzed at a regional level such as the issues emerging with the digital economy and on the special field of the information and communications technology industry, as well as chapters on broad regional trends, on the working of competition law in countries with regulated markets and in the cluster of Central American countries, among others. At the heart of the presentation are nine chapters detailing the competition regimes of the most active national jurisdictions in the region—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Written by practicing experts with considerable hands-on experience in their respective countries, each of these chapters provides a comprehensive description and explanation of the evolution, current state, and prospects for antitrust in the country. Topics addressed in the country analysis encompass the following and more: relevant institutions and legislation; cartel investigations; unilateral conduct policies; merger review; international coordination; enforcement; and remedies. Each chapter includes an analysis of relevant case law, allowing the reader to gauge the positions, views, and tendencies of each competition law regime. The contributors also pay attention to the specificities and idiosyncrasies that are so important for a correct understanding of the practical realities of competition policy and enforcement. With its wide-ranging and in-depth approach, this book provides an incomparable analysis of a challenging region poised to become increasingly important in the international recognition and enforcement of antitrust law. It is in this sense an essential guide for lawyers, economists, corporations, academics, and government officials interested in understanding where competition law is, and where it is going to, in Latin America.

The purpose of this book is to examine the experience of a number of countries in grappling with the problems of reconciling the two fields of competition policy and intellectual property rights. The first part of the book indicates the variation in legislative models as well as the wide variety of judicial and administrative doctrines that have been used. The jurisdictions selected for study are the three major trading blocks with the longest experience of case law (the EU, the USA and Japan) and three less populous countries with open economies (Australia, Ireland and Singapore). In the second part of the book we look at a number of issues closely related to the interface between competition law and intellectual property rights. Separate chapters analyse the issue of parallel trading and exhaustion of IPRs, the issue of technology transfer, and the economics of the interface between intellectual property and competition law.

Antitrust policy nominally plays an instrumental public interest role. The generally accepted notion is that it is a government instrument designed to intervene in relatively unregulated markets in order to preserve rivalry among independent buyers and sellers. Competition authorities are supposed to restrain business conduct that exercises monopoly power aimed at excluding competitors or exploiting consumers and clients. Thus it can be said - although few pro-market theorists make the insight explicit - that antitrust provisions reveal mistrust of the capacity of markets to promote social welfare. The inner logic, enforcement mechanisms, and practical outcomes of antitrust provisions are all intrinsically contradictory to the natural dynamic course of market functioning. In Dr. De Leon's challenging thesis, this mistrust of the market lies at the root of antitrust policy, giving rise always to a preference towards 'predicting' the result of impersonal market forces rather than interpreting the entrepreneurial behaviour which creates those forces. And it is in Latin America that he finds the powerful evidence he needs to support his case. From the formative years of Latin American economic institutions, during the Spanish Empire, economic regulations - far from being driven by the pursuit of promoting free trade and economic freedom - have been conceived, enacted and implemented in the context of deeply anti-market public policies, trade mercantilism and government dirigisme. The so-called "neoliberal" revolution of the 1990s triggered by the Washington Consensus did not really change the interventionist innuendo of these policies, but merely restated the social welfare goal to be achieved: the pursuit of economic efficiency. Dr. De Leon presents his case against the assumption that consumer welfare orientated policies such as antitrust do really promote entrepreneurship and market goals. Paradoxically, antitrust enforcement has undermined the transparency of market institutions, in the name of promoting market competition. The author's provocative analysis marshals several sets of facts in support of his thesis, including the actual functioning of antitrust policy as reflected in case law in various Latin American countries, the preference of merger control over other less intrusive forms of market surveillance, the constrained role of competition advocacy against government acts, and the ineffective institutional structure created to apply the policy. Among the many specific topics treated are the following: government immunity; strategic industries; state-owned enterprises; politically influential groups; measurement of market concentration; the burden of proof of social welfare benefits; the role of joint trade associations and professional guilds; institutional arrangements that favour collusion; selective distribution; sector regulation; erosion of property rights; marginal role of courts in the antitrust system; leniency programs; and privatized public utilities. The growing significance of Latin America in the context of economic globalization endows this book with huge international interest. Written by a leading authority on the topic, this is the first book that presents a detailed description of Latin American antitrust law and policy as it has been developed through numerous judicial opinions. A wide variety of audiences around the world will find it of extraordinary value: competition law specialists, scholars and students of the subject, policymakers and politicians in Latin America, as well as all interested lawyers, jurists, and economists.