European Competition Policy In International Markets

Changes in the institutional, technological and economic environment raise new challenges to the European competition policy. First, firms' behavior, particularly through international M&A and hardcore cartels, could undermine benefits from globalization. Together with the evolution towards more economic liberalization, markets have been reshaped by important technological improvements, putting forward new issues in terms of anti-trust policy, as shown recently by the Microsoft case. Lastly, these changes have been progressively accompanied by a newly institutional competition framework. The dramatic increase in the number of competition authorities incurs a waste of resources for multinational firms and anti-trust authorities and the risk of conflicting decisions between competition authorities.