The Feasibility and Worth of a World Trade Organization Competition Agreement

in deference to the wishes of cautious WTO Members, a mere working group study programme was begun on competition in 1994.2 This project was extended, at Doha, for an agreed two-year period prior to actual negotiations.3 In recent years, officials of the United States, the European Union, Japan and certain developing countries have spoken or written on the competition code topic, providing a spectrum of views concerning whether a binding WTO agreement is desirable and what its form and objectives should be. This article surveys the alternatives, concluding that, by building on the approaches of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIP) Agreement of 1994 and the UN Restrictive Business Practices Code of 1980, a worthwhile WTO competition code can be fashioned and put beneficially into effect.