Which Antitrust Rules Are Suitable for Promoting Sustainable Competition in the Liner Shipping Industry?

Literature has always looked at co-operation in the shipping industry with some benevolence, justifying agreements among operators with the fear that, due to huge fixed costs in the management of freight liners, fierce competition might result in monopolies and eventually jeopardise users’ benefits. Containerisation and standardisation of supply has strenghtened the arguments for co-operation in liner shipping. Containerisation emphasizes co-operation aiming at capacity rationalisation and extension of geographical/temporal scope. While co-operation causes benefits for the transport industry as it reduces the risk of operators, guarantees higher profits and regulates the supply, does it also increase the consumers’ surplus, or does it cause lower benefits and eventually inefficiency? In fact, liner shipping is barely the sole industry heavily exempted from antitrust regulations, both in Europe and North America, usually with the blessing of the shippers themselves. The paper, moving from the recent decision of EU regarding maritime liner sector (Commission Decision C(2002)4349 Case COMP/37.396/D2 – Revised TACA), and from the EU Commission issues Consultation Paper on the review of Regulation 4056/86 (concerning maritime transport), aims at investigating how antitrust set of rules, at the EU scale, have to “monitor and control” the market in a proper way according to the emerging trends of integration in the maritime logistic sector.