Should ASEAN antitrust laws emulate European competition policy?
Click here to read the full article onlineRecent years have seen the ASEAN members embark upon various initiatives that seek to harmonize their competition regimes. These ongoing efforts to modernize and harmonize ASEAN competition laws take place amid a longstanding effort by both the European Union and the United States to export their respective competition laws throughout the world. This raises a critical question: should the ASEAN countries attempt to mimic the competition regimes of other developed nations, notably those that are in force in the EU and the US? And, if so, which one of these regimes should they draw more inspiration from? This paper seeks to dispel the myth that the European model of competition enforcement would necessarily provide a superior blueprint. To the contrary, it shows that the evolutionary, common-law-like regime that has emerged in the US has many strengths that are often overlooked by contemporary competition policy scholarship, and which might provide a particularly good fit for the economic and political realities of the ASEAN member states.