Trustbusting Goes Global

Antitrust has grown explosively in the last quarter century. As of the end of 2004, 102 countries - from Albania to Zimbabwe - had national competition laws on their books. Together, these countries account for more than 85 percent of the world's population. Many of these countries, including China and India, have been strengthening those laws and their enforcement. More than three fifths of the countries with antitrust laws today did not have any laws on the books before 1990, and many of those that did had ineffectual ones. Antitrust spread rapidly as country after country started relying more on markets, rather than central planning and government enterprise, to spur economic growth. Countries that embraced markets soon adopted the same sort of rules for regulating the game of competition that the United States had put in place in 1890 to rein in the excesses of laissez faire capitalism. This chapter provides a brief overview of the global antitrust enterprise as it stands at the beginning of 2009. The remainder of the volume takes deep dives into diverse jurisdictions