Joint Ventures, Antitrust, and Transnational Cartelization

Joint ventures have fired corporate imaginations and captured the fancy of government officials, who perceive them as key weapons in the struggle to achieve global competitiveness. Characterizing the trend as corporate America's version of the singles bar, Business Week reports that in the current rage for "strategic alliances," scarcely a day passes without the announcement of another cooperative inter-corporate agreement. The London Economist reports that "just as the vogue for aggressive takeovers in America and Britain has come to an end, many of the world's biggest companies are scrambling to sign up joint-venture partners or to conclude an alliance with a confederate in some other country." The Wall Street Journal describes the number of international joint ventures as having "rocketed" in recent years, prompting some analysts to anoint them "the wave of the future."