Day: November 8, 2013

3rd Biennial International Conference on “Competition Reforms:Emerging Challenges in a Globalising World”

CIRC-logo

“One of the key initiatives that CUTS and CUTS Institute for Regulation and Competition (CIRC) have taken in last few years is to provide a platform to deliberate and discuss key economic and governance challenges to competition and economic regulation at an international level and had organized two previous conferences in New Delhi, India.

The idea for this biennial series was conceived in the backdrop of developing countries concerns of frequent regulatory failures that undermine the capacity to achieve policies important to citizens and consumers. Such failures are due to persistent and common patterns of over-regulation, under-regulation, poorly designed regulation and implementation, and weak institutional capacities.”

Date: November 18-19, 2013, New Delhi

For further details, click here.

Also, a reminder for the upcomingĀ 3rd B.R.I.C.S. International Competition Conference, 2013, though personally think it’s sad that the attendance for the conference is strictly by invitation. šŸ˜¦

The E – Retailer War Has Reached India.

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A recent Economic Times article reported how a number of “small brick-and-mortar retailers have banded together to seek protection from e-commerce companies, which they say are undercutting them with predatory pricing. The retailers, mostly from Bangalore – home base for Flipkart, India’s largest e-tailer – have written to the Competition Commission of India, complaining that their online counterparts are selling goods below cost and skirting Indian laws on foreign direct investment in retail.”

This is not surprising and frankly, it was only a matter of time. In fact, in one of our previous posts, we focusedĀ on the Department of Justice (DoJ) complaint filed against the five publishers (Hachette, Penguin, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan and Harper Collins) alleging their agreement with Apple to be anti-competitive.Ā 

My personal opinion is that this is part of the Schumpeterian Cycle of “Creative Destruction”, and this struggle is inevitable. To be honest, in the larger scheme of the economic world, this disputes is trivial, as instances of such disputes abound in economic history.