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Shahein, Heba --- "Designing Competition Laws in New Jurisdictions: Three Models to Follow" [2012] ELECD 826; in Whish, Richard; Townley, Christopher (eds), "New Competition Jurisdictions" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: New Competition Jurisdictions

Editor(s): Whish, Richard; Townley, Christopher

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9780857939517

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Designing Competition Laws in New Jurisdictions: Three Models to Follow

Author(s): Shahein, Heba

Number of pages: 32

Extract:

2. Designing competition laws in new
jurisdictions: three models to follow
Heba Shahein1

1. INTRODUCTION

The vast majority of scholars support the view that since the 1990s the
United States (US) and European Union (EU) competition law systems
have become the main sources of reference for jurisdictions that intend to
introduce a competition law.2 Assuming that new jurisdictions consider
adopting competition laws, and that institutional design is, in fact, a
complex and delicate process, two core issues must be discussed. The first
is to question what approach they have followed when formulating and
designing their laws. Do they follow the US and/or the EU competition
models in order not to reinvent the wheel (the cut-and-paste approach);
do they successfully transplant basic concepts, adapted to their local needs
and the context of their markets (the contextualized approach); or do they
create a model in which their competition statutes mirror the characteris-
tics of their markets such as opacity, blockage and political capture (the
tailor-made approach)? 3
Second, a narrow focus on the substantive rules and statutes in new
jurisdictions, inspired by foreign competition models, could be criticized
because this analysis might have little influence on the interpretation and
development of competition laws in these jurisdictions. To be meaningful,
it must move beyond this to broader issues; hence, the interpretation of a

1 Thanks to the ASCOLA conference participants for their helpful com-

ments; and in particular to Josef Drexel, Ulla Schwager, Christopher Townley and
Richard Whish.
...