2003 Reports

Political economy of competition policy in Japan: Case of airline services

Ito, Takatoshi

Monitoring the industry developments for maintaining competitive pressure is important, and assuring the access to facilities for new entrants to the market is important. It is a challenge for the regulatory agencies to consider what kind of competition policy should guide the regulatory policies of the airline services in Japan. In addition, there is a possible conflict between the Ministry and FTCJ over regulatory issues of pricing and routing. This paper will be organized as follows. Section 2 describes some of the recent cases involving competition policy in the Japanese airline industry and section 3 points out challenges in the competition policy in the future.