In 2009, India repealed its 40 year old Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices (MRTP) Act, and brought into force most sections of the 2002 Competition Act. After a brief introduction to the basic economic principles underlying modern competition law, this paper reviews the country’s...

This paper extends an earlier critique (Bhattacharjea 2006) of the empirical literature on labour regulation and industrial performance in India, but focuses more narrowly on the impact of legal restrictions on layoffs, retrenchment and plant closures. After summarizing the earlier paper, it...

This paper adapts an incentive-compatible regulatory mechanism to the problem of taxing a foreign monopolist with unknown costs, when price and quantity contracts cannot be enforced. It is shown that the optimal mechanism involves an import licence fee, and yields zero expected revenue to the...

This paper examines the effects of foreign entry, in the form of either imports or direct foreign investment, into an oligopolistic market. It shows that foreign entry can reduce welfare relative to autarky unless at least some domestic firms exit, or unless the foreign firms capture a very...

Several decades after formally attaining independence, many developing countries continue to trade disproportionately with the European countries that once ruled them. Earlier attempts to examine this phenomenon have relied on inappropriate statistical techniques. After reviewing the existing...

This paper offers a critique of recent empirical studies on the impact of labour regulation on industrial performance in India. It begins with a review of earlier studies that tried to infer the effects on manufacturing employment of amendments to the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) in 1976 and...