Making Markets Work for Africa ― Markets, Development, and Competition Law in Sub-saharan Africa

Using case studies of particular countries and particular regions, delving deeply into the facts, this book focuses on market law and policy in sub-Saharan Africa, showing how markets can be harnessed by poorer and developing economies to help make the markets work for them: to help them integrate into the world economy and provide a better standard of living for their people while preserving their values of inclusive development. It explores uses of power both by dominant firms, often multinationals, and incumbent governments and cronies, to ring-fence their market positions and deprive rivals - often the indigenous people - from fair access to markets and highlights how competition authorities are pushing back and winning fair access, lowering prices of goods and services especially for the poorer population. The book also examines the next level up - regionalism - and provides the facts that show how regionalism has so far failed to meet its promise of freeing markets from cross-border restraints by large firms that operate across national borders.

On the more technical side, the book takes a deep look at the competition policies of sets of nations in sub-Saharan Africa - West, South-eastern, and South. It examines the performance of the competition authorities of particular nations, including how they handle cartels, monopolies and mergers; their standards of illegality, and their methodologies for incorporating public interest values into their analyses.

Observing the good works by a number of the national competition authorities, the book is optimistic about the role of the national competition authorities in protecting the people from abuses of economic power, and, perhaps in the future, the role of regional authorities and less formal networks in promoting an African voice in defence of competition.

Eleanor M. Fox is the Walter J. Derenberg Professor of Trade Regulation at New York University School of Law, where she specializes in markets and economic development, and national and international competition policy with a focus on developing countries and Europe. She was a partner in the New York law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. She served as a member of President Carter's antitrust commission and President Clinton's international competition advisory committee.

Mor Bakhoum is a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, Germany. He teaches the module "Competition Law in Emerging Markets" at the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC). He is also a lecturer at the Master II program in IP, co-organized by WIPO, OAPI and the University of Yaounde II. In fall 2014 Mor Bakhoum spent a semester at NYU at the Jean Monnet Center as an Emile Noel Fellow.