A Cross-Country Analysis of the Relationship between Competition Law and Economic Inequality

This chapter forms part of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, that explores the relationship between competition law enforcement and economic inequality. We are grateful to the trust and the project advisory board, for their support. We would also like to thank Anu Bradford and Adam Chilton for sharing their CLI database at an early stage of this project, and the editors of this book, Jan Broulík and Kati Cseres, for the insightful comments and thorough review of this chapter.

The past four decades have been prosperous. Global GDP per capita has grown by 76 per cent between 1980 and 2019 (in real terms), with higher growth (86 per cent) being achieved by the world’s most industrialised countries. However, over the same period, various indicators show that economic inequality levels have increased in many parts of the world. The latest UN Human Development Report notes that income inequality has risen since the 1980s, and that ‘[t]he global top 1 percent, the economic elite of rich and poor countries, made huge gains over 1980–2016’. So, while the world and particularly industrialised countries have become considerably richer in aggregate, the spoils of this growth have not been distributed evenly and the gap between those with the highest and the lowest incomes has expanded.