Competition Policy enforcement as a driver for growth
Bruegel workshop, Brussels 18/2/2014 Ladies and Gentlemen: Today I would like to share with you some general views on competition policy. I have been in charge of competition policy at the Commission...
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Antitrust risk in EU manufacturing: A sector-level ranking
Based on a dataset of manufacturing sectors from five major European economies (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom) between 2000 and 2011, we identify a number of key sector-level...
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EU to DO 2015-2019
Go to eu2do.bruegel.org to read all the Memos, download the individual Memos and send the Memos to your Kindle. ‘There is now a distinct possibility that this crisis will be remembered as the...
View ArticleHeld og lykke, Commissioner Vestager
Tomorrow, new European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager will take control of the Commission’s most powerful tool: the enforcement of European Union competition law. She will have the power to block...
View ArticleUnbundling Google users from Europe
Without naming it, the proposal points straight to the Google antitrust case The European Parliament is set to adopt a non-binding resolution on ‘Supporting Consumer Rights in the Digital Single...
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Europe should not fear foreign takeovers
Foreign takeovers are often a source of concern for national governments. Concerns might be of a strategic nature (for example over deals in the defence sector) or of a more economic nature. In the...
View ArticleHuawei vs ZTE judgement: a welcome decision?
The legal dispute originates in the Düsseldorf District Court (Landgericht Düsseldorf), where Huawei sought an injunction against ZTE after attempts between the two companies to find an agreement on...
View ArticleAntitrust, regulatory capture and economic integration
Highlights – There is growing worldwide concern about bias in the enforcement of competition law in favour of domestic firms. Even seemingly neutral antitrust laws can lead discrimination if they are...
View Article“Social dumping” and posted workers: a new clash within the EU
Ministers from high-wage and low-wage EU countries are clashing over the treatment of posted workers, but the problem of undeclared work is slipping under the radar. President Juncker stated in 2014...
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German Facebook probe links data protection and competition policy
The German Federal Cartel Office is investigating Facebook for abusing its possibly dominant position in the social network market by infringing data protection rules. The initial suspicion is that...
View ArticleBrexit and competition policy in Europe
The impact of Brexit on competition policy depends on what kind of agreement is secured between the EU and the UK. One option could be a European Economic Area (EEA) agreement, which the EU has signed...
View ArticleCould revising the posted workers directive improve social conditions?
In this parliamentary testimony Zsolt Darvas discussed the importance of posted workers in driving down wages/social conditions in high-wage EU countries and made several conclusions on the state of...
View ArticleEU posted workers: separating fact and fiction
A posted worker is someone who is temporarily (typically for a few months/days) sent to a country different to the country of his/her employer to carry out a service in a host country. For example, a...
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The cost of remittances
Stephen Cecchetti and Kim Schoenholtz document the stubbornly high cost of remittances, and look at avenues for cost reduction. Today, remittance flows are triple what they were in 2000 and five times...
View ArticlePreliminary observations on the European Commission’s Android decision
How is the European Commission’s recent Android case likely to affect digital services in Europe going forward? In July of this year, the European Commission announced that it had reached a decision in...
View ArticleVertical restraints and e-commerce
This paper has been published at Concurrences Review N° 1-2018, Art. N° 86057 www.concurrences.com and has been nominated for the 2019 Antitrust Awards. You can vote for it here. In this paper, the...
View ArticleThe Alstom-Siemens merger and the need for European champions
Siemens and Alstom, Europe’s largest suppliers in the rail market, were one European Commission decision short of merging into a single ‘European champion’ that would become a global leader in the...
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New EU industrial policy can only succeed with focus on completion of single...
This article was first published by Le Monde. France and Germany recently unveiled a manifesto for a European industrial policy fit for the 21st century, sparking a lively debate across the continent....
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Europe and the new imperialism
This article was published by Project Syndicate. Imperialism, Lenin wrote a century ago, is defined by five key features: the concentration of production; the merging of financial and industrial...
View ArticleBreaking up big companies and market power concentration
On March 8th, US senator Elizabeth Warren published an essay outlining her proposal to break up the country’s big tech companies, specifically naming Amazon, Google and Facebook. These companies,...
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