英文摘要 |
The novel coronavirus that afflicted the world in 2020 was named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO) on February 11, 2020 and was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. On April 27, 2020, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Competition Committee also released its competition policy responses to COVID-19 reports on May 25 and 26, 2020. Since March 2020, the United States Federal Trade Commission also set up a webpage with dedicated resources on COVID-19, as well as announced a series of measures pertaining to the enforcement of antitrust and unfair laws relating to COVID-19, a few of them which were jointly released with the United States Department of Justice. The European Commission similarly set up a dedicated COVID-19 webpage and has since March 2020 also issued guidance on competition law enforcement and approaches in response to the COVID-19 crisis. ECN and ICN also released Joint Statement on application of competition law during the Corona crisis and Steering Group Statement on Competition during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic. Since the pandemic poses as a brand new challenge to competition enforcement agencies around the world, the question of how the existing competition law structure and enforcement measures should be adjusted in order to confront the economic crisis, is the most important question for all countries to resolve. |