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This article advances several reasons why EU competition policy on vertical restraints has been a failure. First, the distinction between price and nonprice restraints is inconsistent, since the economic effects of both practices are similar. Second, EU competition law creates a number of inefficiencies that cause a negative impact on social welfare; an example is the ban on absolute territorial protection that does not allow a full protection from free-riding. Third, it is doubtful that the inefficiencies of EU competition law can be justified by the market integration goal, since the rules may turn out to be ineffective in reaching this objective. Fourth, EU competition law on vertical restraints has created negative side effects: it has put an end to experimentation and innovation of competition rules at the member-state level and induced private interests groups to spend a lot of effort in lobbying national regulators. The example of resale price maintenance for books serves as an illustration of the latter problem. Several of the above pitfalls have been indicated by Richard Markovits in his treatise on U.S. antitrust law and EU competition law. These criticisms are supported in this paper and further expanded by a discussion of additional errors that have made the EU competition rules on vertical restraints a policy failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the pharmaceutical industry, originator companies researching and developing new medicines typically obtain a range of patents to protect these medicines against generic competition. On the other side, generic suppliers seeking to enter the market will often challenge the validity of these patents or may simply launch their products, forcing the originators to bring litigation to enforce their patents and prevent the generics' entry. In the context of the corresponding litigation, the originators and generic suppliers often decide to enter into a settlement. While the settlement terms will vary from case to case, a number of settlements have involved a payment made from the patent holder (the originator) to the accused infringer (the generic supplier) in order to settle the dispute (reverse-payment patent settlements). Against this background, this paper seeks to analyze the compatibility of such settlements under U.S. antitrust law and EU competition law drawing on recent cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose to push the frontier of global value chain (G VC) governance analysis through the concept of 'polarity'. Much of the existing GVC literature has focused on 'unipolar' value chains, where one group of 'lead firms' inhabiting a specific function in a chain plays a dominant role in governing it. Some scholars have explored the dynamics of governance in GVCs characterized as 'bipolar', where two sets of actors in different functional positions both drive the chain. I expand this direction further to suggest conceptualizing governance within a continuum between unipolarity and multipolarity. Empirically, I do so by examining the evolutionary dynamics of governance in biofuel value chains, with specific focus on the key regulatory and institutional features that facilitated their emergence and expansion. First, I examine the formation, evolution, and governance of three national/regional value chains (in Brazil, the US, and the EU); then, I provide evidence to support a trend towards the increasing but still partial formation of a global biofuel value chain and examine its governance traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]