The Commission has spent the past week preparing the ground: the revision of the EU Merger Guidelines, we are told, is not about lowering the bar, nor about approving every deal without serious scrutiny.
Yet the mood among practitioners seems different. What emerged yesterday at the AGCM Conference was a clear expectation of weaker enforcement. The reaction from some national competition authorities was correspondingly concerned.
That said, I have argued since time immemorial for a more dynamic approach to merger control (and to everything else - this goes back to my *German* PhD in economics). Static analysis is insufficient where future rivalry, discovery, potential competition, data, ecosystems, etc. matter more than immediate price effects.
So I remain curious to see what the draft says on innovation. If the revised Guidelines make innovation analysis more serious, operational and evidence-based, that would be welcome. If, instead, “innovation” becomes the new respectable language for approving concentration in the name of scale, the revision will likely cause problems rather than solving them.
No comments:
Post a Comment