Title: A Critical Review of Competition Law on Abuse of Market Dominance in The Southeast Asian Developing Countries
Abstract: Since the first antitrust law entered into force more than a hundred years ago, the philosophy of preventing monopolies in the market has spread all over the world. In its early days, competition law covered only matters relating to competition issues in the domestic market. However, as national markets and economies have become globalised under the influence of the vigorous business activities of multinational enterprises, competition law and policy relating to those in a particular jurisdiction has become important because enterprises with market power can violate competition law in that jurisdiction. In particular, quite a number of competition regimes nowadays adopt the principle of the extraterritorial application of their competition rules to multinational firms, even where those firms belong outside the regime, where the business practices of the firms affect their markets. For that reason, it is crucial to understand competition laws and policies in other jurisdictions so as not to infringe their laws, especially when there is no single international organisation for enforcing competition law. The problems of diverse rules and a different level of enforcement in each competition regime have led to conflicts between competition regimes; their laws may be used as a means to protect national champion companies, which can be discriminatory against companies from overseas. In addition, unlike the hard-core restrictions like those against cartels, there is a divergence between competition regimes in their rules on the abuse of market dominance. Therefore, a comparative study of competition laws is meaningful if one is trying to design some harmonisation that may reduce the conflicts between competition regimes. Despite the present problems referred to above, each competition regime has learned from and adopted legal techniques from other jurisdictions, and this can provide a friendly environment for convergence. A number of Southeast Asian countries have recently adopted competition laws, and their laws prohibiting abusive conduct have similar frameworks. Although it is somewhat difficult to observe the application of the provisions on abusive conduct, due to the dearth of case-law, assessing the substantive provisions in Southeast Asian countries can help us to understand the similarities and differences between competition regimes in the developing world, thereby reducing possible clashes in this region. Thus, this article aims to provide a comparative study on the competition rules on the abuse of market dominance in Southeast Asia, for the further development of enforcement through cooperative efforts.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-02-01
Language: en
Type: review
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