During the course of the debate at the WTO on the Singapore issues, a number of government officials from developing countries have suggested that their countries would derive little benefit from competition law enforcement. Some even argued that competition law enforcement would actually hinder the development of their country. To a large extent these views were based on the idea that domestic anticompetitive practices are not prevalent on developing economies or do not impose a large cost on their economies. This discussion on the relationship between trade competition and development, however, has remained fairly abstract in multilateral fora. This article attempts to look at the reality of anticompetitive practices around the turn of the century in developing countries by drawing from numerous public sources to identify the types of anticompetitive practices most frequently observed or alleged by type and sectors. The analysis shows that the economies of developing countries are subject to a wide array of anticompetitive practices, that such practices not only hurt consumers in developing countries but also affect the competitivity of the economies of these countries, and that they are often similar across countries. The policy implications of such findings are discussed in the last section.
World Competition