Economic Welfare Standard & Consumer Welfare Standard: A Study of India, EU and US Competition/Antitrust Law Regime

The consumer welfare standard (CWS) is the traditional approach to competition analysis, which focuses on consumer welfare as the primary objective of competition law. The CWS seeks to protect consumers by promoting competitive markets, which are expected to provide better products, better prices, and better quality. Under the CWS, competition law is primarily concerned with preventing anticompetitive conduct such as price-fixing, abuse of dominance, and mergers that are likely to harm competition and consumers. On the other hand, the economic welfare standard (EWS) is a more modern approach to competition analysis, which seeks to balance the interests of consumers and producers. The EWS recognizes that competition can create both winners and losers, and that the goal of competition law should be to maximize overall economic welfare. Economic welfare includes not only consumer welfare but also producer welfare, which includes profits, innovation, and efficiency gains. Under the EWS, competition law is concerned with preventing anticompetitive conduct only to the extent that it harms economic welfare. However, there have been conflicting views across various jurisdictions with respect to adoption of either the total welfare standard or the consumer welfare standard into the competition policy and regulatory regime as these two goals are not mutually exclusive. Thus, this paper studies the evolution and examines the position of welfare standards in European Union (EU), USA and India. The research is descriptive and analytical making it doctrinal in nature. The primary sources include various statutes, regulations, reports and case laws of India, EU and US antitrust/competition law regime. The secondary sources of data are inclusive of articles, blogs, journals, magazines, etc.