Competition law and the millennium round

Abstract

To advance the debate about whether competition should be on the agenda of the World Trade Organization, this paper identifies the keypoint at which trade law and competition law meet: the blockage of market access by anti-competitive restraints. At this open-market intersection, there is a synergy to be captured by combining principles of free trade and principles of free competition. The author proposes a simple architecture, with a choice of law principle for seamlessly incorporating into the WTO a discipline against private market access restraints. The author cautions against indiscriminately raising antitrust issues to an international level and against doing so under a trade law banner. For the world competition issues that are not trade issues, a free-standing World Competition Forum is proposed, interactive where appropriate with the WTO.