The Next Generation of Global Competition Law

The Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991. This accelerated a trend toward both the development of market economies and competition law to protect those economies. No one could have predicted that within twenty years most of the world’s trading economies would have adopted recognizable forms of competition law including the former nations of the Soviet Union, the centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe, a host of transition economies in Africa, South America, and Asia, and such emerging economic giants as Brazil, China, and India. Bill Kovacic has played a key role in helping us move from the world of 1991 to the world of the present where over one hundred twenty jurisdictions have some recognizable form of competition law. This has been the one of the principal, but by no means the only, topic of his work as an academic, then as general counsel, commissioner, and chairman of the FTC, and now back in academia. Kovacic has studied competition systems around the world, advised many of them, traveled relentlessly to dozens of these jurisdictions, and represented the FTC in interacting with them in countless public and private fora for these same two decades. This essay focuses on the insights that Kovacic brought back from his travels and embodied in his scholarship. I also focus how his work has both documented and affected transition economies enacting and enforcing competition law for the first time, their advisers from more experienced jurisdictions, and the more mature competition jurisdictions themselves. Finally, I offer a brief outline of a research agenda to help evaluate how well both old and new jurisdictions have applied these insights over the past twenty years and suggestions for the next twenty years