Sustainability Impact Assessment of Proposed WTO Multilateral Trade Negotiations: Competition

Discussions over the relationships between trade policy, competition policy and private anti-competition practices have been going on for a long time. This is not to say that the issues at the centre of the debate have remained the same over the years. In fact, since the Singapore Ministerial Declaration there has been a pronounced shift in emphasis away from the market access related aspects of competition policy towards the minimum standards and core principles for national competition law and the enforcement of such laws.

In the 1980s and until the mid-1990s much of the debate over the relationship between trade and competition policy centred on the fear that domestic private anti-competitive practices might be able to frustrate foreign access to national markets. This concern is particularly important given the prominent role that the reciprocal exchange of ‘concessions' on market access plays in the multilateral trading system.

A number of ambitious proposals were advanced at that time for international disciplines on national competition law. A prominent example is a proposal by a group of academics and experts (known as the "Munich Group") for a multilateral antitrust code that could be incorporated into the WTO as an annex. Such a code would provide for minimum standards, which would be enforceable in domestic jurisdictions by national enforcement agencies. International disputes were to be handled in a dispute settlement regime that would include a permanent international antitrust panel. The current proposals for a multilateral framework on competition policy are far less reaching in scope, reflecting in part discussions on competition policy that have taken place in the WTO and in other international fora since the meeting of the Ministers of WTO Member States in Singapore in 1996.