Van Miert wins support for global watchdog project

Date: 10/12/1998

By Chris Johnstone

Competition Commissioner Karel Van Miert has won crucial support from the EU's trading partners for his bid to step up world-wide cooperation between competition watchdogs.

National experts at the World Trade Organisation agreed this week to push ahead with a focused programme of work to examine ways of plugging the gaps in global competition scrutiny, in the absence of an international body to coordinate the action of national or regional authorities such as the EU.

"We were looking for a clear programme for future action and this is what we have got," said Van Miert's spokesman Stefan Rating.

Trade officials will focus on three key issues next year: how far basic WTO principles such as most-favoured-nation treatment can be applied to competition; how cooperation and communication between national authorities can be improved; and how an improved framework for competition can dovetail with efforts to promote international trade.

The European Commission has been in the forefront of the campaign for increased joint action as regulators struggle to cope with the increasing globalisation of business, signing bilateral deals with the US and Canada and attempting to foster EU-style subsidy and anti-cartel watchdogs in central and eastern Europe.

Van Miert has suggested that increasing the WTO's powers and responsibility to allow it to take the lead in vetting competition cases with a world-wide dimension would be a logical step forward. But some countries, such as India and Mexico, have already warned that they do not want moves towards closer cooperation on competition to go too fast or too far.