| Summary: | 碩士 === 東吳大學 === 法律學系 === 95 === As a result of increased globalization and the introduction or expansion of antitrust enforcement in many countries, many transactions now are subject to simultaneous antitrust scrutiny by multiple competition authorities around the world. Although markets for many products are increasingly global, competition law is nonetheless enforced by individual competition regimes on a national or regional basis. The limits of on national merger control regimes and the growing gaps in global governance reflecting those limits from the problems to which this thesis is directed.
The recognition of limits of national competition law has given birth to new generation of bilateral cooperation agreement. However, bilateral agreements, while important, are insufficient to cope with the challenges posed by globalization. The merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas and the merger between GE and Honeywell have revealed the tensions and limits.
The major effect of contemporary multi-jurisdictional merger review is that it undermines global welfare. Each jurisdiction assesses effects within its own market rather than effects on the world’s market, no jurisdiction focuses on assessing the impact of transnational merger on global markets. Thus, the switch to the focus on international welfare is seen as an important feature of an international competition policy to prevent the national competition policy from restricting international competition.
Therefore, the lacuna in harmonization of international/transnational merger control has understandably and deservedly attracted and become a subject in some fora. And the contours of the operation of an international merger control regime have further sought to be identified.
Given the political value of merger approval decisions, it was apparent that it would be difficult to achieve an international consensus on the merger control. Therefore, one possible solution seeks to address the additional public and private costs which are incurred as a result of overlapping national merger control regimes by creating some degree of harmonization or, in some cases, an international merger control authority with jurisdiction over transnational merger. Another suggested proposal is to establish an international institution or mechanism with the function to identify the particular transactions which have no anti-competitive effect since it is more realistic to expect nations to agree in relinquishing control over cases which have no anti-competitive effect within their territories.
In further, from the perspective of enterprises, even in the absence of substantive convergence, the harmonization of procedural issues such as notification requirement, filing procedure, waiting period as well as the sharing and exchange of information and deepened cooperation in investigation offers significant potentials for efficiency increasing and costs decreasing.
WTO and some other international institutions have been proposed as fora to develop some forms of multilateral competition cooperation. However, seeing the failure of Draft International Antitrust Code and the fact that competition issue has been shelved in the Doha Round, it seems that most counties are not ready and do not expect to have a more strict comprehensive international merger control approach than the status quo. Therefore, to cope with international merger control issues in separate level would be regarded more practical for the coming future.
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