With business moving increasingly beyond national borders, Tokyo and Washington agreed Tuesday to begin negotiations on concluding a bilateral agreement to effectively counter anticompetitive corporate activities, officials of the Fair Trade Commission said.

According to FTC and Foreign Ministry officials, the pact would stipulate the two sides inform each other if either the FTC, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice are to apply antitrust laws on corporate activities that would negatively affect their benefits.

The agreement would also cover measures for the two to cooperate in effectively enforcing antitrust measures. It would enable units on both sides to ask their counterparts for cooperation in applying antitrust laws to certain corporate activities that hamper market competition, while urging them to pay due consideration to mutual benefits when resorting to such force, they said.

The officials said the agreement would serve as a common standard for Japan and the U.S. to deal with market competition, and help the U.S. reduce the extent to which its antitrust laws are extraterritorially applied.