The comparative study of competition laws in the developing countries consist of two parts, and the first year of research focused on the laws in the Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. In particu ...
The comparative study of competition laws in the developing countries consist of two parts, and the first year of research focused on the laws in the Southeast Asian countries, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. In particular, this research aims to analyse the legal provisions on the abuse of market dominance by means of comparing the relevant legal measures in the Southeast Asia with those in other competition regimes, thereby to find the unique features in the developing world and expect further developments in implementations. Through this analysis, we found that the EU's Ordoliberalism influenced the development of competition laws in this region.
In effect, the comparative analysis explains the similarities in the substantive provisions of abuse of market dominance between Southeast Asia and Korea, which leads to a conclusion that the competition regimes in Asia have adopted the legal techniques in the EU and Korea. This highlights their adoptions of foreign legal provisions and develop these rules to fit into their circumstances.
The first-year research provides some explanations of the lack of competition law culture and understanding of competition rules in the developing countries, which may lead to the concerns about inappropriate implementation of the law. Furthermore, the number of relevant cases of abuse of market dominance is few, compared with the cases in Korea, the EU and the US. Therefore, it is not easy to find the current approaches of competition law enforcements in Southeast Asia. However, it is possible to analyse the development of competition rules on abuse of market dominance in this region by discussing the existing problems in the substantive provisions and guidelines that were provided by the competition policymakers in Southeast Asia. The outcome of the first-year research, which was already published in an academic journal, suggests proposals for new guidance of abuse of market dominance and enhanced cooperation with the competition authorities in other jurisdictions for further development of effective enforcement.
The second-year research focused on the laws of competition in India and China. In effect, India was the second competition regimes in Asia, which indicates its long history of competition law legislation. However, there was no effective implementation of the law. In order to solve this problem, the Indian competition regime provided a modernisation programme which led to a new competition law of 2002 which was amended again in 2007.
In addition, China had a twenty-year discussion of competition law legislation and eventually adopted competition law in 2008, which means that China is a young competition regime, compared with the case of India. Particular, there are some differences between the competition regimes of India and China, considering the recent development of their enforcements. Unlike its neighbouring countries, China declared its extraterritorial application of competition law in an international cartel case. Moreover, there have been ground-breaking cases of new economy, such as two-sided market, Internet market, and minimum resale price maintenance. This demonstrates a rapid development of the Chinese competition regime.
In conclusion, the first-year research focuses on a comparative analysis on the legal measures of abuse of market dominance in Southeast Asian countries while the second-year research deals with the backgrounds of competition laws and policies in India and China, including the substantive provisions and their implementations.