Reconciling Equity and Efficiency: A Global Challenge for Competition Policy

Buildings in London, including the The Gherkin, viewed from the South side of the Thames

29 May 2019

Publication details

Gerard, Damien and Lianos, Ioannis (2019) Reconciling Efficiency and Equity: A Global Challenge for Competition Policy, Cambridge University Press.

Summary

Due to the growing influence of economics and economists in competition law and policy discourse and the internationalization of antitrust, the equity versus efficiency trade-off debate has played a defining role in the transformation of the dominant paradigm governing competition law enforcement since at least the 1970s. The debate remains crucial today as issues of economic inequality and its interaction with efficiency become of central concern to policy and decision-makers in competition law, as well as in other spheres of public policy. Despite their central role in the grammar of competition law on the global plane, the intellectual underpinnings of the interactions between 'equity' and 'efficiency' in the context of competition law have never been examined in-depth. This book aims precisely to fill this gap by discussing new approaches in understanding the role of efficiency and equity concerns in competition law.

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