Competition law and neoliberalism: the regulation of economic concentration in Brazil

The intriguing coincidence between the global diffusion, in the 1990s, of measures of privatization and market liberalization characteristic of neoliberalism, and the worldwide spread of competition laws to control the economic power of corporations has been often naturalized or silenced. How to make sense of the fact that the liberalization of markets was accompanied by more regulation directed to control the behavior of corporations? The hypothesis here developed is that competition law, as it has been practiced, contributed to the production of an economic arrangement propelled by neoliberal ideals. I argue that the dominant approach to the enforcement of competition law has legitimized one of its defining traces, the concentration of economic power. To illustrate this hypothesis, the article gathers empirical evidence from a case study of the enforcement of the regulation of economic power by the Brazilian competition authority, the Administrative Council for Economic Defence (CADE), between 1994 and 2010.