On The International Harmonization Of Competition Law Under The WTO

Competition law, which aims to maintain free competition and protect the consumers' interests, plays an important role in the market economic countries, and is considered as the "constitutions" of the market mechanism. The problems of restricting competition should be subject to a state, however, the economic globalization makes the problems international. WTO is the largest and most influential world trade organization and its aim is to pursue the free and fair international economy which has been damaged by transnational restrictive competition conducts. It becomes an inevitable trend to carry out competition legal harmonization in WTO. The first chapter of this article analyses the necessity of competition law harmonization. Two kinds of questions: one is to do harm to and hinder international economic development and international social progress; the other is to bring the extra costs and other negative influence on the national authorities and multinational companies because of the lack of and non-system of international competition law. There is the unilateral countermeasure so called "effect doctrine" in the national legislation in order to deal with the overseas conducts of restricting competition and protect national interests. But such measures will bring many defects such as the conflict of jurisdiction and can not solve the problems completely. So the problems of restrictive competition could not be regulated effectively only by a national competition law and should introduce the mechanism of international harmonization in the field of competition law. The second chapter analyzes three kinks of competition law harmonization models. As for the convergence models of international competition law, there are three categories divided according to the degree and measures of international competition law harmonization: the model of bilateral cooperation mechanism, the model of competition law convergence and the model of integrated international competition law framework, all of this models are interactive and interdependent. The third chapter analyzes history and previous conditions of competition law harmonization in WTO. The fourth chapter focuses on how the WTO coped with the challenges, what difficulties to confront and the possibility to harmonize the international competition law in WTO and the prospect of harmonizing the international competition law in WTO.