In Japan, depopulated local economies are emerging rapidly. Therefore, it may be difficult for regional banks to compete with each other and offer their services sustainably in the future. The Japanese government addressed this issue with a new interpretation of the Japanese Antimonopoly Act（AMA）and an enactment of a new legislation which exempted regional banks from the AMA. First, the Japan Fair Trade Commission（JFTC）revised the merger guidelines in 2019, and the current guidelines stipulate the determining factor of “size of a particular field of trade” in deciding a substantial restraint of competition. Second, in 2020, the exemption legislation was enacted to provide merging regional banks with opportunities to skip the merger reviews of the JFTC, if the mergers are approved and supervised by the Financial Services Agency（FSA）. The important question is the relationship between the new interpretation and the exemption legislation. Surely, both are similar in legalizing mergers of regional banks. However, a time span, a geographic range, and/or a service range in deciding a substantial restraint of competition in a particular field of trade under the AMA may be different from those in deciding an approval of the FSA under the exemption legislation. Although the exemption legislation has some aspects of interim measures, we can find its own normative justification from the perspective of a time span, a geographic range, and/or a service range.

一橋大学大学院法学研究科

2022-11

Japanese(jpn)

departmental bulletin paper

VoR

10.15057/78405

1347-0388

AA1161370X

一橋法学

21

3

311

347

21巻3号(2022.11)

https://hdl.handle.net/10086/78405