Dynamic Efficiencies and Technological Progress in EC Merger Control

Magdalena Laskowska, University Paris II Panthéon-Assas

Abstract

Economic growth largely hinges upon technological progress and productivity gains are the key to rising incomes and living standards. As high technology industries have significantly increased their prominence in global economic performance in the 1980s and 1990s and economic policy has focused on innovation, merger laws have become a crucial part of antitrust enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic. In recent years, many mergers and acquisitions of control have occurred in innovation-driven industries. Hence, it is important to ask a fundamental question : how is the importance of technological progress reflected in the competition authorities’ decisional practice? Due to space limitations, we have limited our review of how conventional merger control accounts for technological progress only to the decisional practice of the European Commission. Our analysis provides a comprehensive and exhaustive review of all the phase-II merger decisions taken by the European Commission from the establishment of merger control at Community level (21 December 1989) to 21 September 2008.