Fundamental difficulty underlying international harmonization of competition policies

Abstract

The international harmonization of competition policies is widely perceived as a prime area for international policy discussion. We demonstrate that this harmonization, unlike a general tariff reduction, cannot be guided by the principle of reciprocity. Towards this end, we build a two-country partial equilibrium model with non-tradable service sectors. The governments play a game in which they choose the degrees of competition in their respective service sectors. In a Nash equilibrium, one country chooses the perfectly competitive policy whereas the other country chooses an imperfectly competitive policy. This equilibrium cannot be transformed into the first-best state by the principle of reciprocity. © IAET.