A compulsory cartel or forced cartel is a cartel that is established or maintained by an administrative order or by a legal directive. The interference of policies on these associations of entrepreneurs of the same trade varied. It ranged from a mere decision to establish a cartel or to maintain an existing one, to a strict state control.[1]
The understanding of “compulsory cartels” as “cartels” has always been disputed.[2] While the older cartel experts before the 1930s usually insisted in the free entrepreneurial will that constituted a “cartel”, later authors were more tolerant and accepted forced cartels as an exception. In recent times (2007), the economic-historian Jeffrey R. Fear took this stance of the “exception to the rule” that would not contradict the general nature of these organizations.[3] The cartel-historian Holm Arno Leonhardt has positioned himself more differentiated in 2013: Forced cartels that were embedded in a totalitarian planning economy or were by other means unable to realize their own will, should be regarded as organs or appendages of another system.[4] Thus, “compulsory cartels” without a permanent political influence could indeed constitute real “cartels”, while others being under strict control acted mainly as servants of an alien will.
