Since the mid-1980s, competition (or antitrust) policy has spread rapidly across the Global South. Once a policy area associated primarily with established democracies, a vast majority of emerging and developing economies now have designated competition laws, and they include both democratic and authoritarian regimes. Moreover, the legislation adopted by this highly diverse set of countries has converged on a particular model; a model with three main elements or pillars: (a) a cartel prohibition, (b) an abuse of dominance prohibition, and (c) merger control.

How can we account for the adoption and spread of this model? To what extent do domestic and international conditions play a role in the process? The speaker Christel Koop seeks to answer these questions by analysing new data on the adoption of the three pillars of competition policy in 148 emerging and developing countries, in the period from 1985 to 2020.

Christel Koop is a Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. Her research focuses on regulation, central banking, and other areas of economic policy-making, both at the national and EU-level. She is particularly interested in the independence, accountability and legitimacy of technocratic decision-making.

Christel holds a BA and MPhil degree in political science from Leiden University, in the Netherlands, and obtained her PhD degree in political and social sciences from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Before joining the departmentKing’s College London, she was Fellow in Public Policy and Administration at the London School of Economics and Political Science.