Editorial: The EU’s Competition Policy Agenda

Abstract

The EU’s competition policy agenda is of paramount importance to the European Union on a number of grounds. First, the public enforcement of EU competition rules buttresses the Single European Market (SEM). By establishing an integrationist regulatory level playing field across the Union and having the necessary competition instruments in place to enforce it, EU competition policy increases competition intensity within markets, thereby driving the competiveness of EU firms. Secondly, and this is relatively new, EU competition policy increasingly provides a vehicle whereby private individuals can claim damages that result from the anti-competitive behaviour of firms, thereby reinforcing the deterrent effect of this policy. Thirdly, the international dimension of the competition policy agenda is important in not only securing access to overseas markets for EU firms by the removal of beyond-the-border competition distortions in these markets; but also in ensuring that the anti-competitive behaviour of non-EU based companies outside the EU, which distorts competition within the SEM, comes under EU competition law, thereby conferring extra-territorial reach upon the law. The EU’s competition policy agenda is not static but dynamic and evolving. This Special Issue of the Liverpool Law review discusses each of these three themes in turn. More specifically, the first theme of enhancing the integrationist level playing field is covered by the papers of Ulrich von Koppenfels and Leigh Davison. The former discusses proposed changes to the scope and operation of public enforcement of EU merger or concentration control, specifically those put forward