Economic Dimensions of Global Cartels, Detected 1990-2017: Food and Agriculture Markets

<p>The Private International Cartels (PIC) Data Set comprises the largest collection of legal-economic information on contemporary price-fixing cartels. The total sample encompasses 1305 private hard-core cartels that were discovered between January 1990 and December 2017. This subset covers the <i>global </i>cartels (those that fixed prices across two or more continents) in the food and agriculture industry detected between 1990 and 2017. This spreadsheet contains a list of economic data (firm numbers, duration, affected sales, and cartel overcharges) The overcharges are derived from a published paper that surveys more than 700 published economic studies and judicial decisions from which were extracted more than 2,000 quantitative estimates of overcharges of hard-core cartels. The second spreadsheet (Private Intl Cartels Table A7 PURR 2020-01-09.xlsx) lists legal information on each member of the cartel, such as dates of litigation, the company names, executives’ names, and the penalties levelled against the cartelists by all of the world’s antitrust authorities. The dataset documents the global size, economic impacts, and anti-cartel enforcement of contemporary private international cartels and the world’s antitrust authorities and national courts (excluding appeals). The sample is believed to be a reasonably complete list of all discovered contemporary private international cartels in jurisdictions that have a well maintained antitrust-authority Web sites. Government or private legal actions (i.e., formal investigations, damages suits, fines, or consent decrees) are recorded up to August 2019. Monetary data are expressed in nominal U.S. dollars, using exchange rates during the cartel’s life or the day a legal action was announced.</p>