PhD Project : The Regulatory Convergence of Global Competition Laws and Practices

Project carried out by Angela Wigger, MA

The Regulatory Convergence of Global Competition Laws and Practices

The project is directed at analyzing the pro-active forces in the many bilateral and multilateral frameworks that promote increased global convergence of regulatory competition rules and practices.


The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of competition regimes both in developed and developing countries, all enforcing different norms and practices with different levels of regulatory stringency. As more and more antitrust actions have substantial transnational components, cross-border competition cases increasingly fall simultaneously within different jurisdictions. To overcome problems of regulatory overlap, a number of competition authorities have engaged in bilateral cooperative agreements with their main trading partners. In addition, initiatives have been launched to establish a multilateral understanding of ‘appropriate’ behaviour in cross-border competition governance. In particular the European Commission’s DG Competition has put much effort in levelling the road towards a potential multilateral competition regime. So far, due to fierce US resistance and the opposition of some developing countries, no binding multilateral agreement have been achieved.

The contemporary global developments in the field of competition policy indicate that not only business is transcending national boundaries, but that regulators are starting to behave in the same way, creating an ever-denser web of inter-agency contacts.

This leads to the following set of research questions:

  • Who are the vanguards in setting the parameters for increased global convergence of competition laws and practices?
  • What are their incentives and what kind of global competition policy are they pleading for? Where do interests clash and why?
  • What is the role of the EU and in particular the Commission’s DG Competition in the promotion of a competition regulation on a global scale? To what extent does it represent the interests of transnationally operating businesses?
  • What are the major mechanisms through which convergence of global competition policy (both substantive and procedural) is trying to be achieved?


The problem of transnational regulatory overlap and the subsequent demands for regulatory convergence and harmonization are relatively common issues that accompany global economic interactions, however, not everywhere have mechanisms evolved to deal with them. Examining the nature of the ongoing attempts towards global competition governance will contribute to understanding not only why, but also how and under what conditions the process of regulatory convergence is taking place.