Bibliographie sélective OHADA

This is an accepted manuscript of an article authored by Michael Trebilcock, and later published in International Economic Governance and Non-Economic Concerns.

This is the version of record of a paper presented at the Third EnviReform Conference, authored by Michael Trebilcock.

There has been a dramatic shift in the focus of trade policy concerns in recent years from the barriers that lie at the border to the barriers which exist “within the border.” The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO) and other regional trading arrangements have been largely successful in reducing both the levels of tariffs worldwide and the scale of other border measures such as quotas. This has revealed a new and more subtle category of measures which restrict trade – the numerous regulations which governments enact to protect the health and safety of their citizens and the environment in which they live. Such regulations vary tremendously across borders: one nation's bunch of grapes is another nation's repository of carcinogenic pesticide residue. These efforts to protect citizens from the hazards of everyday life have become a virtual minefield for trade policy makers, in part because such differences can often be manipulated or exploited to protect domestic industry from international competition, and in part because even when there is no protectionist intent on the part of lawmakers, through a lack of coordination, mere differences in regulatory or standard-setting regimes can function to impede trade through increasing multiple compliance costs. It has thus become increasingly difficult to delineate the boundaries between a nation's sovereign right to regulate and its obligation to the international trading community not to restrict trade.

From an economic perspective, globalization is dismantling national barriers to entry and is transforming domestic markets into a global market. To meet the challenges posed by the integration of markets, corporations are joining forces with their former competitors to expand their presence in the global market. Rapid growth in transnational mergers to create global corporations is one of the key features of globalization. As multinational corporations are uniting, so should antitrust agencies that regulate them. Antitrust agencies around the world are realizing that the consumers whom they are mandated to protect are being adversely affected by decisions made beyond their national borders. By using the "effects" test, countries bring within their jurisdiction review of any merger or acquisition involving foreign companies with significant revenue or assets within their jurisdiction. The proliferation of merger control laws, in the absence of a mechanism to coordinate the transnational merger review, places an unnecessary burden on merging parties, and runs the risk of divergent outcomes, which at times cause friction among nation-states. Both to alleviate unnecessary burdens imposed on corporations and to reduce inefficiencies produced by the disparate review of a single transnational merger by several countries, this thesis proposes an International Merger Control Regime integrated into the WTO. The proposal focuses on ways to operationalize a "Lead Jurisdiction" model of oversight rather than on the creation of a new supranational decision-making agency. WTO dispute settlement and arbitration would be used to resolve conflicts arising out of the inability of a Lead Jurisdiction to arrive at an outcome satisfactory to other significantly affected jurisdictions.