Abstract
AbstractSince 1989, no major European merger has been able to go through without EU approval. The introduction of a centralized merger control procedure was another increase in the powers of the Commission's Directorate‐General for Competition (DG COMP). While some see it playing a neo‐mercantilist role in a positive European integration, others underline its neoliberal ideological roots. Through our analysis of all merger decisions made between 1990 and 2016 (6,161 cases), we instead find evidence for market‐centred negative integration: DG COMP is particularly harsh towards coordinated market economies and targets sectors that have high levels of state intervention, thus thwarting the rise of ‘European champions’. Our interviews with merger experts and the decision citation data further suggest that this market‐centred logic of enforcement is not necessarily driven by ideology, but by the silent logic of bureaucratic autonomy. We thus contribute to the debate on the EU as a supranational force of economic liberalization.
Highlights
Article by an MPIfG researcher Sebastian Billows, Sebastian Kohl, Fabien Tarissan: Bureaucrats or Ideologues? EU Merger Control as Market-Centred Integration
We find that the Commission intervenes more heavily, deciding to move the case to a phase II investigation, if merging firms are from coordinated market economies (CMEs) and from sectors prone to state intervention
The second, more structural view, embedded in negative integration theory, is that whatever their intentions, officials’ behaviour is largely shaped by the institutions to which they belong. In support of this latter structural view, we propose that a certain bureaucratic autonomy led Directorate General for Competition (DG COMP) to act against the CME network and purely domestic mergers; this was neither a grand vision or design nor a direct outcome of the ideological leaning of certain commissioners
Summary
Article by an MPIfG researcher Sebastian Billows, Sebastian Kohl, Fabien Tarissan: Bureaucrats or Ideologues? EU Merger Control as Market-Centred Integration. We provide an empirical assessment of the origins and scope of this form of bureaucratic power. In more than 200 cases the merged entity had to make costly commitments that ranged from a promise to divest from a specific market to the resale of an entire division to competitors (phase II investigations). As it targets large merger and acquisition deals, which in 2014 constituted €700 billion in Europe (Bradford et al, 2018), merger control has become the most potent and visible of all policy instruments in the hands of the DG COMP. Momentous decisions include the 2001 prohibition of the GE/Honeywell merger, the largest
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