Cartels Portrayed : Deterrence Effects of Penalties - A 21-Year Perspective, 1990 to 2010

The following charts illustrate the global size and economic impacts of the modern international cartel movement and the enforcement responses of the world’s antitrust authorities and national courts. The sample encompasses 640 private hard-core cartels that were subject to government or private legal actions (i.e., formal investigations, damages suits, fines, or consent decrees) between January 1990 and December 2010. Each cartel had participants with headquarters in two or more nations. The sample is believed to be a reasonably complete list of all contemporary private international cartels discovered by jurisdictions with an active press or informative antitrust-authority Web site. All monetary data are expressed in nominal U.S. dollars using exchange rates during the cartel’s life or on the day a legal action was announced. A special effort is made to create charts that illustrate trends in cartel dimensions and antitrust decisions