A new piece by Balanced Economy Project's Senior Fellow Hilary Jennings and Open Markets Institute Research Fellow Claire Lavin published in Competition Policy International's Antitrust Chronicle.
The European Commission’s draft Merger Guidelines recognise harms the previous guidelines missed, from innovation and resilience to buyer power over workers, and they accept that merger control helps maintain the balance of power democratic societies depend on. We welcome that.
The same draft opens new routes to clearing mergers, including a safe harbour for buying up young innovators. The Commission’s own study of more than 3,800 mergers it cleared since 1990 found innovation fell and markups rose, at the merging firms and at their competitors. The Commission prohibited nine merger prohibitions between 2015 and 2024. That is not a record of over-enforcement.
We are calling on the Commission to drop the priority given to scale and remove the shield.
You can read the full piece here.