The Philippine Competition Act: A Mextiza?

Abstract

The proliferation of competition law regimes among developing countries has exponentially grown in the past three decades. Although competition law is not new in the Philippine legal system, it was only in 2015 that Philippines eventually passed into law a national competition law regime, which appears to be a marriage of EU and US regimes. Anent, this article undertakes to analyze the implications of combining the two systems in the Philippine Competition Act. In particular, one major concern is the interpretation of the analytical framework of the two competition law systems – the dichotomy of per se doctrine and rule of reason in the US on the one hand, and the bifurcated framework of Article 101 of the TFEU and the dichotomy of “object” rule and “effect” rule. It argues that fusion created a complex regime that has a downside effect on the administrability and predictability of the law. It illustrates further that the motivations of the adoption of the PCA reflect that the Philippine competition law aims to achieve multifaceted goals, not only purely economic goal and that the lawmaking dynamics can zealously overshadow contextualization. The paper concludes that it would have been more pragmatic for the lawmakers to have singly focused on the US antitrust legal system as model in designing the provisions of the PCA both from institutional and normative consideration. For one, the Philippine competition law norms, prior to the passage of the PCA, have always been aligned with the US antitrust law system.