Suchergebnisse

This paper provides a survey of european antitrust law enforcement since its foundation in the treaty of rome of 1957 up to and including 2004. We present a complete overview and statistical analysis of all 538 formal commission decisions under articles 81, 82, and 86 of the european community treaty. We report a range of summary statistics concerning report route, investigation duration, length of the decision, decision type, imposed fines, number of parties, sector classification, nationality, and commissioner and director general responsible. The statistics are linked to changes in legislation and administrative implementation, thereby providing an historical overview that summarizes the commission's work in the area of antitrust. One or more appeals were filed with respect to 161 of the 538 decisions. We estimate the determinants of the size of the imposed fine and probability of appeal when an infringement has been found.

Throughout the first three-quarters of the last century, the economies of scale and scope present in production, distribution, management and R&D dictated increasing firm size (Chandler, 1990). Moreover, the growing but relatively low level of economic development went together with high price elasticities stimulating price competition that again favoured large scale production. Statistical evidence points towards an increasing presence and role of large enterprises in the economy during this period (Caves, 1982; Teece, 1993; Brock and Evans, 1989). This development towards large-scale activity was visible in most of the OECD countries (Audretsch, Thurik, Verheul and Wennekers, 2002). The importance of entrepreneurship and small business seemed to be fading. At the same time it was recognized that the small business sector was in need of protection for both social and political reasons, but not on the grounds of economic efficiency (Audretsch and Thurik, 2000).