Series

William Lazonick writes that recent United States industrial policy initiatives miss the centrality of corporate resource allocation for creating a robust economy, characterized by...

Taiwan has a history of implementing industrial policies to successfully encourage the development of internationally competitive high-tech firms. However, the new administration’s efforts to reorient industrial policy to achieve Taiwan’s commercial-cum-defense goal risks harming its economic resiliency.

Bill Baer argues that the United States’ history with promoting national champions through industrial policy shows how protection and the diminution of competition often backfires on the favored companies and the state. He writes that industrial policy must complement competition policy.

Elizabeth Popp Berman writes that the history of the antimonopoly movement and industrial policy in the United States shows that antitrust and industrial policy, currently considered by many to be in conflict, can complement each other in pursuit of shared goals.

Andrew Gavil examines the Biden Administration's antitrust policy, placing it in the broader historical context of evolving competition law. He questions the fit of Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shift for antitrust policy and argues instead that Biden's initiatives reflect the unique demands of the digital economy and the true nature of antitrust, which is ever evolving.

Randy Stutz writes that the Biden administration has recalibrated antirust policy by devoting more equal enforcement attention to competition in buyers’ markets and sellers’ markets, thereby promoting the welfare of both suppliers and consumers. The shift raises questions about whether courts should engage in “multi-market balancing”—the weighing of harms in one market against benefits in a different market—when the interests of suppliers and consumers diverge.

Tim Brennan finds the new shift in antitrust thought and enforcement connected to the Neo-Brandeisian movement to be flawed for the most part. However, he writes that a reinvigorated focus on tacit collusion, which some have blamed on the rise of prices for groceries and apartment rents, may deserve consideration and further study.

Richard S. Markovits discusses the tests of illegality promulgated by United States antitrust law and their moral desirability. He also considers whether there have been any recent shifts in the paradigmatic approaches that are taken to these and other antitrust law/policy issues.

Steven C. Salop writes that the Biden administration oversaw a paradigm shift in antitrust, but it was the full adoption of the ideas of the Post-Chicago school, whose intellectual influence has countered Chicago since the 1980s, rather than the empowerment of the Anti-Monopoly or Neo-Brandeisian school of thought. This latter school of thought played an important role by motivating increased enforcement and corralling political support, even if it did not lead to cases that could not have been brought by Post-Chicagoans.

Daniel Francis reviews the evolutionary and revolutionary dimensions of the Biden administration’s antitrust work, and argues that these two projects have been in deep tension. He concludes that the administration’s evolutionary work within the welfarist paradigm has generated some important successes, but that the revolutionary effort to restore a pre-welfarist vision of antitrust has failed on its own terms — and, in failing, has left welfarism all the stronger.