The Revelation Of The Evolution Of U.s. Antitrust Policy On China's Anti-monopoly Legislation

In recent years, with the development of the socialist market economy system, reform and opening-up policy has been going deep forward. While at the same time, monopoly, an important issue that can never be avoided and must be solved in any marked-oriented economy, has been confronting us when the process of economy reform progresses ahead. It is now admitted that the market economy is always associated with competition and competition process is critical to market economy. If competition exists in the market, resources tend to be allocated efficiently; when competition is weak or nonexistent, however, the power of monopoly could presumably misallocate resources. As an objective economic phenomenon, monopoly exists in every market system. We cannot ignore monopoly since it is always liable to emerge in the market economy. And China has not drawn up an antimonopoly law, thus giving rise to several problems as follows: what is the opinion of literature on monopoly? Why antimonopoly? If not, what kind of monopoly should be opposed? How do developed market economy nations deal with the monopoly problem? Have their antimonopoly policies achieved the expected goals? What enlightment can we learn from their experiences and lessons? Undoubtedly, studying these questions has both theoretical and practical significance. This paper makes an attempt to look into these questions. This article divides the discussion into three chapters. Chapter One investigates the history of monopoly as well as the opinions of classical economists, Marx, Lenin, neo-classical economists in chronological sequence. In different period, monopoly has different effects, so scholars place different emphasis on the importance of monopoly. That is to say, classical economists and Marx stressed little on monopoly, because in their times monopoly hardly existed; Lenin had a systematical theory of monopoly but his purpose was to reveal the essence of imperialism, not the allocation consequence of resources, which was mainly investigated by neo-classical economists. This paper also attaches emphasis to the allocation consequence of resources under market economy, so the theoretical analysis of monopoly of neo-classical economics is adopted. Compared with a perfect competition firm, a monopoly has negative allocation consequences that include: (1) higher price, lower output and welfare losses; (2) unfair income distribution; (3) X-inefficiency; and (4) pursuit of monopoly profit. However, there also exist some positive effects of monopoly, because monopoly can bring: (1) scale economy; (2) technology progress and innovation; and (3) efficiency increase, etc. So we should make scientific classification of monopolies, if some kinds of monopolies must be opposed. Monopolies include two kinds, one is derived from market competition, the other comes from non-market factors梥pecial franchise. Then theoretical conclusion is drawn that antimonopoly aims mainly to administrative monopoly that has privilege basis. Chapter Two goes on to discuss the question of how to fight against monopoly. This paper has attempted to connect the analytical methods and models of industrial organization analysis with the myriad facets of antitrust policy. This approach is based on two important attitudes that we share. First, we take the U.S. antitrust laws as the basic reference of the public policy regarding monopoly. And second, we view the evolution of antitrust public pol...