Competition policy and intellectual property rights in developing countries

We argue in this paper that developing countries would gain if a WTO agreement were reached that recognised the principle that competition law should promote open competition, emphasised international cooperation in competition enforcement, and disciplined the most anti-competitive forms of public and private restraints against market contestability. Developing countries have a great interest in implementing active domestic competition policies, encompassing both appropriate, pro-competitive regulations in the narrow sense and market liberalisation in the broader sense. An important reason is that existing WTO Agreements, especially the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), invite a full consideration of policies for competition maintenance in countries where such policies are weakly developed. In the next section we discuss aspects of competition policy in developing countries. Some illustrations are provided from competition problems in Tunisia. We then turn specifically to linkages between intellectual property rights (IPRs) and competition rules, and consider the form in which a limited agreement on competition approaches would be potentially beneficial for developing countries. A welfare-enhancing accord would focus on basic principles, cooperation in procedures, and disciplines against clearly anti-competitive measures.