THE IMPACT OF AEROSPATIALE - ALENIA/DE HAVILLAND AND RYANAIR/AER LINGUS CASES ON THE REFORM OF EUROPEAN MERGER CONTROL
THE IMPACT OF AEROSPATIALE - ALENIA/DE HAVILLAND AND RYANAIR/AER LINGUS CASES ON THE REFORM OF EUROPEAN MERGER CONTROL

Summary/Abstract: From our beginning, the fight for resources and the human wish of growth and wealth leaded to a competitive behaviour of individuals and, by extension, that of their economic undertakings. While some developed an economic outlook on competition, there were some authors further adding the legal component as a governing principle of competition. In the spirit of a form-based approach, early EU competition law aimed to insure the economic freedom, missing openness towardscertain practices. The founding Treaties, the modifying ones and the European acts in the field outlined the safeguarding of the internal market as a goal of competition law. Still, an important source of European competition law was offered to us by the case law. The shift towards the effects-based approach ensued the regulation as ex-post assessments of the merger impact on competition were undertaken. Different implications of Merger Control in EU competition law will be discussed in this paper, one which follows the spectacular evolution of the impact of different European Decisions on the change of competition law. The paper is a study on evolution of the Merger control and the analysis how much impacted two European Commission decisions prohibiting mergers the Single Market the reforms of each regulation development before each one of them.

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