The WTO's First Antitrust Case - Mexican Telecom: A Sleeping Victory for Trade and Competition

A World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute panel has decided theWTO’s first antitrust case. It resolved the matter infavour of the United States’ claim that Mexico had anticompetitivelyfacilitated exploitative prices and a cartel that raised theprice of terminating cross-border telephone calls in Mexicoand thereby harmed trade and competition. The case is Mexico– Measures Affecting Telecommunications Services (April2004) (‘the Mexican telecom case’). This essay arguesthat if the WTO’s antitrust clause was in fact triggered(which is a point of contention), Mexico’s conduct violatedits obligations. Furthermore, it argues that the GATS antitrustobligation in the telecommunications sector should be acknowledgedas occupying an important place at the intersection of trade,competition and industrial policies. Antitrust law is the otherside of the coin of liberal trade law. Antitrust law opens marketsby prohibiting private and other commercial restraints, whiletrade law opens markets by prohibiting public restraints. BeforeMexican telecom, no legal discipline was regarded as copiousor flexible enough to address combined public and private restraints.In particular, nations were allowed free rein to privilege nationalchampions that harmed competition in and out of their country,imposing costs on outsiders as well as on their own people.A positive reading of the antitrust clause helps to fill thegap.     

Reviews

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Health policy and ERISA: interest groups and semipreemption

This paper is a history of the health policy results of the Employee Retirement and Income Security Act of 1974, particularly section 514, which preempts state laws "which relate to any employee benefit plan" but permits states to continue to regulate the business of insurance. This history exemplifies how health policy is often made outside conventional arenas. On the basis of published primary sources and interviews with a number of key participants, the paper describes how interest groups which rarely act together coalesced to create and sustain semipreemption and its effects on state and federal health policy. The paper concludes with an assessment of recent state legislative efforts to address the problems created by ERISA semipreemption. The ironical results of semipreemption occurred because of the absence of a coalition of interest groups that was sufficiently strong to resolve the fundamental questions raised by our commitment to linking health insurance to employment.     

The Politics of National Recognition: Honouring Australians in a Post‐Imperial World

The announcement in January 2015 that Prince Philip had been chosen to receive an Australian knighthood (an honour which itself had been controversially revived the previous year) sparked a fury of debate about honours, and about the continuance of a British connection in Australia's national life. Such debates were not new, echoing earlier arguments about honours as a national or imperial symbol. Through two related case studies — the Australian honours system and the Australian of the Year award — this article explores the politics of national recognition in 1970s and 1980s Australia. We consider both the politics involved in the creation and alteration of awards by which individual achievement and service are recognised by the nation, and the politics involved in imagining and recognising an Australian nation as expressed in those awards. We argue that these two institutions were more than a means to acknowledge hard work or sacrifice; they were also significant sites for contests over the nature of Australia's post‐imperial identity.     

Administrative Easing: Rule Reduction and Medicaid Enrollment

Administrative burden is widely recognized as a barrier to program enrollment, denying legal entitlements to many potentially eligible individuals. Building on recent research in behavioral public administration, this article examines the effect of voluntary state reductions in administrative burden (administrative easing) on Medicaid enrollment rates using differential implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Using a novel data set that includes state-level data on simplified enrollment and renewal procedures for Medicaid from 2008 to 2017, the authors examine how change in Medicaid enrollment is conditioned by the adoption of rule-reduction procedures. Findings show that reductions in the administrative burden required to sign up for Medicaid were associated with increased enrollments. Real-time eligibility and reductions in enrollment burden were particularly impactful at increasing enrollment for both children and adults separate from increases in Medicaid income eligibility thresholds. The results suggest that efforts to ease the cognitive burden of enrolling in entitlement programs can improve take-up.