The Steady Advance of Wal-Mart across Europe and Changing Government Attitudes towards Planning and Competition

Aggressive internationalisation activities by global retailers frequently encounter, in addition to responses from indigenous rivals, the regulatory mechanisms of the governments of host or target nations. However, these public regulatory mechanisms are themselves in a state of flux, often as a function of internal conflict between government policy sectors. Internationalisation itself is also an agent of change and we illustrate this using the example of retail regulatory systems in Britain and the Netherlands at the time of Wal-Mart's entry into the EU. In both countries, an ambivalent stance by the central government was evidenced by the publication of reports by planning authorities and investigations by competition authorities.