Research On The Green Exemption System Of Anti-monopoly

At present,all countries around the world have complied with the trend of environmental protection and start to carry out green legislation.In China,the value of environmental protection,as an important value concept of public interest,has penetrated into the legal system.It is also an inevitable trend for anti-monopoly legislation and practice in China to integrate the consideration of environmental factors in the competition policy.In addition,the green exemption system is embodied in Article 15 of the anti-monopoly law in China.However,due to the imperfection of relevant legislation and the omission in the process of law application,the system has not been implemented well.This paper starts from the analysis of EU green exemption system,and explores the integration process of its environmental policy and other policies.Taking environmental agreements as an example,this paper discusses how to review the applicable standards of the exemption system from three aspects:the purpose of the agreement,the effect of competition and economic efficiency.According to typical cases,the paper attempts to clarify why the European Commission would emphasise on the "economic rationality" analysis by focusing on the time of promulgating important documents.Moreover,the paper aims to explore the purpose of the European Court to introduce the ancillary restrain doctrine into the practice,which may be learned for the construction of the green exemption system in China from its mature legislative and practical experience.Given the urgent environmental protection needs in China recently,this paper discusses the status quo of insufficient integration of environmental policy and competition policy.There exists certain problems in the legislation of green exemption system,including the lack of green legal system to provide protection for the value of public interest,the ambiguous concept and the conflict meaning in the articles of anti-monopoly law,and the lack of objective and specific evaluation criteria for the core considerations of exemption determination such as "economic efficiency"and "proportion principle".Then,through the analysis of eight cases,it is identified that there are some problems such as the inadequate investigation of the purpose of the agreement,the unreasonable analysis of the preconditions for the application of the exemption system,the unclear starting point of the exemption procedure and the neglect of the particularity of the value of the public interest,which was based on the view of differences in the application of the exemption system between the anti-monopoly law enforcement agencies and the judicial authorities.Additionally,this essay put forward some possible suggestions for the improvement of anti-monopoly green exemption system in China.Firstly,the value of social public interest should be clarified,and the dominant position of environmental policy in anti-monopoly law should be established.Secondly,the omissions in the legislation need to be improved.We should strengthen the construction of the green legal system in our country and offer suggestions for the concept of fuzzy or conflict in the law.At the same time,it is suggested that introduction of ancillary restrain doctrine in the legislation as the way to determine the green exemption system.Finally,the judgment criteria can be refined in the practice from three aspects:the purpose of the agreement,the analysis of competition effect and whether consumers share interests.Furthermore,the exemption procedure can be standardized from specifying the authority of censorship,clarifying the process of censorship and improving the conditions of censorship,which may achieve the integration and embodiment of environmental value in the competition policy.