From Disorder To Order: The Wto System Of Rules Of Competition Research

Competition has been a growing concern for experts in economic and forensic realm. Nowadays, people are much aware of use of rational means in regulating inappropriate conducts in competition. Many countries have established a sound legal system for competition to eliminate the influence on which those improper conducts exert. With regard to the international trade law, people began to eye on those restrictive competitive conducts at the time when GATT was established. But unfortunately, owing to the differences in the legislative guidance between trade and competition and also the sensitivity in national interests, research on this issue has been stagnant for a long time after world war II.With the in-depth development of trade liberalization, people are aware that the restrictive trade conduct, which is born primarily in home market and restrained by the domestic competitive rule, inflicts more and more negative effects on the international trade. Under such circumstances, many scholars began to demonstrate which method is introduced in solving this issue. Generally speaking, the scholars in America and Europe analyze the interdisciplinary question from the perspective of economics, with a tendency towards traditional competition in settling the restrictive conducts. To summarize, their research findings can be divided into two: the first is to establish the unified and independent entity competition rules and supervision constitution on the world level, the second is to set up a core principle of WTO which guarantees the legal system guiding domestic competition to come up to the minimum unified standard. These two schemas set a relative high-level global market competition as their goals. However, the scholars in those developing counties, stress the necessity of establishment of competition law suited to their own conditions in light of long-term development of economy and oppose the unitary competitive standard by advocating that low-level market competition is conducive to the expansion of export and keeps pace with the advanced scientific technology of the world.Within the framework of heated argument and diversified orientation, the rule concerning competition of WTO, the most influential economic and trade organization is eye-catching. On the one hand, it covers such wide range of fields as tariff, trade, investment and intellectual property rights. Its competition rule is bound to inflict a big influence on the real international economic and trade. On the other hand, the value of competition rule of WTO is bound to be a guidance to the coordination of international competition rule, especially when the latter is in dispute. Therefore, we have reason to make a thorough analysis on the competition rule of WTO from the following perspectives: what is the basic recognition of competition rule? What appearance will it take after a long evolution? What is its destination? Only by doing so can we conduct in accordance with the competition rule of WTO realistically and also can we get known the developmental law theoretically.This paper, attempts to make preliminary answers to the question mentioned above in four parts. The first part, is about the developmental process of competition rules of WTO, namely. pre-WTO and post-WTO. The competition rule in pre-WTO phase refers to that of ITO and GATT1947 . The competition issue in the charter of ITO was at embryo and provided a guidance to the later rule although not established. In light of the close connection between GATT1947 and WTO, the competition rule of GATT is also a very important composite and great attention has been paid to the development of competition rule after post-WTO. Although the development has not been fruitful, it still represents some kind of motion course of competition rule of WTO.The second part, is an objective description of current competition rule of WTO. By analyzing the competition rule entailed in the basic principle of WTO to seek the integral value orientation WTO adopts, this part mainly concentrates the diversified competition rules in WTO agreements. In addition, the application of dispute-solving mechanisrr of WTO on the competition rule is one of the most important rules. Though this application is not very smooth, it makes possible that the competitionrule of WTO can be executed.The third part is an overall assessment of competition rules of WTO. As the paper points out, competition rules of WTO is wholly not systematic, which is at odds with the pursuit of order WTO emphasizes in competitive arena. This non-systematization reflects non-systematic between and inside all protocols. If we still think further, it's not hard for us to discover the reason on the surface or in the deep. Modification of non-systematization is the developmental orientation in the future. Besides, it analyzes the flaws of competition rules of WTO.The last part demonstrated three main measures to make competition rules of WTO from being chaos to orderly. These include "multilateral agreement", "forum approach" and " WTO approach", which are complementary to each other. If we combine all the factors such as difficulty of realization, the feasibility, the prospect and the public opinion, "the forum mode" is the optimal choice, at least presently. But the ultimate goal of WTO is the establishment of unitary multi-agreement of competition and the realization of full orderliness of competition rules, we must combine these all together.