글로벌경쟁정책과 무역 이슈의 최근 동향

In the era of globalized market the enforcement of national competition law may have adverse effects on foreign firms and/or other countries. For this reason, while competition law remains essentially a matter of domestic jurisdiction, competition issues contain international or global characteristics. Compared with other global issues, however, competition issues is not enough mature to be codified to form any multilateral treaty law. Given complex competition matters and deep differences in national competition laws, it is not surprising that all attempts to create global competition law since 1920s have been failed. Although there is no empirical study about cost-benefit analysis on global competition law, the continuous failures to achieve global competition law from 1920s to 2000s well show that most countries consider that the benefit of global competition law is trivially small or zero, but the cost of global competition law is incredibly huge. So it can be estimated that the cost of global competition law is larger than the benefit. In this sense, global competition law is not an efficient way to correct negative externality. Moreover there is a possibility that multilateral-treaty-based competition law would not work better than national competition laws, and be free from over/under enforcement problem. For these reasons, it is unrealistic to expect that international community can establish any comprehensive international treaty law on every competition issues in the foreseeable future. Given this situation, it seems that bilateral or regional agreements on selected competition matters (e.g., international price-fixing cartel, co-operation of enforcement) might be an efficient way to correct negative externality.