| This dissertation conducts analysis on the evolution of India's competition regimes from 1965 to the present day. The central research question is: How have India's competition regimes interacted and conflicted with and accommodated themselves to the country's informal business institutions? Special attention is given to the country's traditional family-based business groups, which predate its formal competition rules by many decades.;Two time-dependent arguments and a comparative case study approach are employed. The approach predicts that the interactions would be very different before 1991, compared with the post-1991 period when new business interests emerged, economic liberalization accelerated, and detailed discourse, debate and analysis took place on a new formal competition regime for India.;The dissertation adds to the comparatively little academic research on competition policy in India over the past two decades. It as well illustrates the benefits from applying to competition policies in developing economies a competition regime approach and a more comprehensive conceptual framework that encompasses recent advances in new institutional economics and related economics literatures.;Informal business institutions proved to be a good prism for analysing the evolution of India's competition regimes over a four decade period that experienced dramatic changes in the country's economic performance and the broader economic policy regime and discourse. India's traditional family-based business groups continue to be very important to India's private economy. As predicted, the number, quality and outcomes from the interactions, conflicts and accommodations between India's competition regimes and informal business institutions are very different after 1991 compared with before. These differences made an important contribution to the improved performance of the Indian economy after 1991.;At the same time, the empirical story is richer and more complex than presumed by the two arguments. A single direction argument for the pre-1991 period---that well established informal business institutions would prevent the competition regime from achieving its objectives---was enriched by assessing the strategic responses of business groups in order to avoid the high transactions costs and risks of dealing with the pre-1991 competition regime. Consistent with path dependence, past interactions are presenting difficult challenges for the new competition regime. |
