Implemented jointly by ICTSD and the World Economic Forum, the E15Initiative convenes world-class experts and institutions to generate strategic analysis and recommendations for government, business and civil society geared towards strengthening the global trade and investment system for sustainable development. The E15 Expert Group on Competition Policy is co-convened with Bruegel . Important synergies or complementarities exist between trade liberalization initiatives and the application of measures to suppress anti-competitive practices or arrangements. In fact, both anti-competitive practices of firms and state-orchestrated arrangements that restrict competition can undermine the gains from trade in myriad ways. Perhaps, the clearest examples of such effects involve international cartels that allocate national markets among individual producers, abuses of a dominant position that limit access to facilities that are necessary for the importation of goods or services, and import cartels or anti-competitive vertical market restraints that exclude foreign suppliers from a market. As another manifestation of complementarity, trade liberalization can itself be a powerful tool for addressing competition policy concerns, for example, where the liberalization of government procurement markets through participation in the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) helps to make bid rigging more difficult, by increasing the number and diversity of competing suppliers. More...
Written by Robert Anderson, Anna Caroline Müller