The Factors Affecting Antitrust Merger Control

Since the 1990s, with the further opening of economy, the chinese government has always regarded mergers and acquisitions as means to reform the state-owned enterprises, and promote the international competitiveness of domestic enterprises. Antitrust merger control, as one of the three core contents, by preventing through acquisitions or other structural combinations from decrease the market competition, is essential to establish an effective competition policy, to maintain a normal market economy operation. In particular, our country has a great potential for mergers and acquisitions, and the growing scale of foreign mergers, therefore, control of mergers and acquisitions is one of the important problems which china should focus on. In the current context of economic globalization, if there is no control on M & A on their own territory, especially to the foreign mergers and acquisitions, the host country would be tantamount to deprive of their rights. China's antitrust law relatively start later, our antitrust law is implemented in the August 1,2008, also the relevant guidelines issued in 2009. Overall, the antitrust laws in the merger control and the matching guidelines are both in the initial stage, therefore, we should draw on other countries, particularly the U.S. Antitrust process and analysis methods.Theoretically, the factors influencing the antitrust enforcement of the america started from posner (1970),and siegfried(1975),peltzman(1976),ghosal and gallo (2001),faure-grimaud and martimort(2003) all had a relatively more rigorous statistical test in comparison to the simpler model of posner (1970).however, in conclusion, the effect of all kinds of economic and political variables is not clear, for different researches had positive, negative or even irrelevant conclusion.so, the mechanism of economic and political factors affect the merger control is more of an empirical research question.As china's merger control has just begun, as of september 2010, china's ministry of commerce has one total ban, and of 6 M & A passed with conditions. Therefore, we can not make a research based on the china's data. Considering merger control as a universal world control policy, this paper related to the U.S. Data from the U.S. Antitrust division of the department of justice.and this paper regards the total number of merger cases and the total number of civil court cases as variables, and seeks for a general and economic model to explain how the regulators of the government enforce their antitrust laws with regard to the merger control by the possible factors such as the economic and political factors. The model is then tested by the U.S. Antitrust merger control policy. Besides, this article explores the unique factors influencing the china's antitrust merger control and this would provide a basis for the policy formulation and implementation.In this paper, by means of empirical research methods, the study found: Economic and political factors indeed impact the enforcement of merger control in some way. In the general model, the total economic output, the total number of merger cases, personal income levels, the parties which the president is vested, the proportion of seats of the republicans in senate and house of representatives all impact on the enforcement of merger control, but foreign trade did not significantly affect the control. Based on the model in general, this article analysed the special factors of the antitrust merger control in china, and mainly focused on the smaller size of merger control, the net balance of exports, ownership structure and other economic factors.Innovation of this paper is mainly reflected in two aspects:(1) this paper's research is based on the samples between 1958-2009, with a strong timeliness and a longer span; (2) different from the use of market concentration with a clear tendency of the harvard school structural factors, this article took a macro point of view on economic factors, and introduced new variables such as import and export.