ABSTRACT
Since the late nineteenth century, the gradual proliferation of national competition policies reflects the emergence of free market economies throughout the world. These competition policies – broadly including merger review, cartel andmonopoly policies and state aids – operate as regulatory tools to prevent anticompetitive business activity from undermining the benefits of competition in a domestic free market economy. As markets internationalize, however, the implementation of competition policy is no longer simply a behind-the-border matter of regulating domestic business activity. Rather, it becomes the subject of important bilateral and multilateral efforts to prevent political disputes and anticompetitive business activities from destabilizing the international political economy.
