Competition Policy, Industrial Policy, and Corporate Conduct

There has been a phenomenal growth in the adoption of competition laws, with the number of countries having such legislation increasing to over 100 in 2011 (ICN, 2011).2 The growth has been strongly promoted by international financial institutions and donors as part of programs to “make markets work” and must rank (in terms of adoption) as one of the more successful of such policy pushes by the Washington institutions.3 There was also considerable pressure to adopt a particular legal framework with the OECD and World Bank jointly developing a “model” competition law (World Bank/OECD, 1999). In reality, however, there is considerable diversity in the legal and institutional regimes that countries have adopted.4 From a quite different starting point, recent work on how countries develop and evolve to “open access” regimes with more inclusive economic institutions and markets has also identified the importance of competitive markets although with strikingly little analysis of what this actually means (North et al., 2009; Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012).