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The modern industrial states desperately need more competition in order to generate growth and employment. Although the European Union pushed the member states to open several sectors to competition, there is much left to be done. At the same time powerful interest groups try to avoid or to reduce competition on European labour markets, in the health systems, in the transport and energy sector, in public services, and in many other areas. This book shows that there is much to be gained from intensifying competition and that especially consumers would benefit. One task is to lay a sound basis for the application of competition. The other task is to implement and guarantee competition. The authors try to contribute to both

On May 1, 2004, two major reforms of the EC competition enforcement regime are expected to enter into force: the modernization of antitrust enforcement, based on Regulation 1/2003,1 and the review of the European merger control system. In this contribution, I will outline the main principles underlying these reforms. In Part I, I will focus on the instruments the Commission intends to adopt early in 2004 in order to guarantee the efficient functioning of Regulation 1/2003, the so-called modernization package. Subsequently, in Part II, I will present the guiding principles of the future merger control in Europe, as they result from the modifications to the current merger control regulation that the Council agreed upon in November 2003. In addition to these two major reforms, the Commission also is reviewing the Technology Transfer Block Exemption Regulation. In Part III, I will describe the main features of that draft regulation that is also supposed to enter into force on May 1, 2004.

The effects of (private, small-scale) piracy on the pricing behavior of producers of information goods are studied within a unified model of vertical differentiation. Although information goods are assumed to be perfectly horizontally differentiated, demands are interdependent because the copying technology exhibits increasing returns to scale. We characterize the Bertrand-Nash equilibria in a duopoly. Comparing equilibrium prices to the prices set by a multiproduct monopolist, we show that competition drives prices up and reduces total surplus.

It is sometimes argued that political competition yields benefits to the citizens just as competition in economic markets yields benefits to consumers. We consider the economic costs and benefits of political competition and find that the story is somewhat more complicated. We first review the limited existing literature on this topic, and in the process, identify a number of distinct interpretations of what constitutes political competition. We then turn our attention to two forms of political competition based on what we refer to as accountability for incumbents and electoral politics. We find that, while political competition can yield allocative benefits for the public, it can also generate aggregate welfare costs by constricting the set of politically feasible public investments.

The European Competition Law Annual 2002 is the seventh in a series of volumes following the annual workshops on EU Competition Law and Policy held at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University in Florence. The volume reproduces the materials of the roundtable debate that took place at the seventh Workshop

This paper discusses the constraints that small jurisdictions face in matters associated with competition law and policy in view of their small domestic market. Special reference will be made to Malta, where competition legislation is modelled on EC law. The thrust of the argument is that certain aspects of competition law may not be desirable to implement or may be more difficult to put in operation in a small state. It is concluded that exceptions, based on considerations such as improved efficiency, distribution, and overall consumer benefit, are likely to be of major relevance to small jurisdictions. ; N/A