Competition Law and Development
Competition Law and Development
Lessons from the U.S. Experience
This chapter first briefly describes the founding and early development of the U.S. antitrust regime, explaining how it came to take the unique form that it did. It also describes how, and how well, the regime works and concludes with lessons for developing countries from the American experience. The primary lessons are (1) a competition law regime should not be established unless a country already has established political and judicial institutions that observe the rule of law, and (2) generalist judges are poorly suited for either the development of competition rules or their enforcement, with the single exception of a per se prohibition of obvious cartels. For everything else, either (1) a single national competition authority with power to both make and enforce policy, reviewed by generalist courts, or (2) a single expert enforcement agency that brings cases to a specialized competition court staffed by experts is far better.
Keywords: United States competition institutions, origins of U.S. antitrust law, U.S. economic development, comparative law, U.S. and developing countries, competition law
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