Institute of the competition protection in national and international law: experience, problems, prospects
Abstract
The article deals with the general concept of legal regulation and protection of competition. Antitrust laws prohibit actions aimed at restriction or distortion of competition in the economy. However, these prohibitions are not absolute, and actions, though being formally covered by these prohibitions, may be regarded as lawful if the state antitrust authority considers that they are beneficial to consumers and contribute to improving production or trade. Thus, the “competition law” is reduced to certain forms of administrative regulation of the market the public utility of which has not been proved. The author proves the thesis that competition regulation is carried out throughout the legal system, and the restriction of the “competition law” to the level of the household (economic) legislation is methodologically wrong. Following the specialists in the sphere of economy who oppose the special antitrust (“competition”) legislation, the author argues in favor of the necessity of a fundamental change in problem approach. Special laws on competition, as well as the existence of antitrust public authorities are not justified at the macroeconomic level. Part of the norms contained in such laws may be transferred to the civil, criminal and administrative law; as for the other part which directly concerns antitrust regulation and authorities, it would be advisable to abolish it at all. Unfair competition of economic agents can and must be stopped as part of adversary civil proceedings or criminal prosecution if there is a legally defined crime. With regard to the antitrust public authorities which are authorized by the law to influence pricing, changes in the scale of production, trade and other issues of economic policy of enterprises, their role in improving the social welfare (from the point of view of both producers and consumers) seems questionable to the author.
Keywords:
protection of competition, antitrust, antitrust legislation, antitrust authority, competition law, unfair competition, combating monopolistic activity
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Articles of "Pravovedenie" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.