In this article presented at the GW Lab's Academic Workshop, Senior Fellow Jorge Padilla discusses how the antitrust frameworks in the EU, UK and US are being challenged conceptually, ideologically and empirically. In particular, they are criticized for downplaying the economic and political cost of underenforcement.
In this essay, Jorge Padilla accepts, for the sake of the argument, that enforcement has been excessively lenient, though he believes the jury is still out, and focuses on investigating whether the alleged under-enforcement of the competition laws is caused by the move towards a “more economics approach” to competition law enforcement. In his opinion, the evidence is mixed. Yet, the answer should not be less economics but better economics and greater scrutiny of both economic and non-economic evidence when they fail to point in the same direction.