In some East European countries, vigorous competition law enforcement comes at a great cost for National Competition Authorities (NCAs). Non-volitional leadership change, enforcement intensity slow-downs, and controversial judicial rebukes work to destabilise the competition systems’ development. On the contrary, other jurisdictions in the region are developing a focused and forward-looking competition policy alongside building a steady enforcement tradition.
Previous research (Pecotic Kaufman 2021, 2022, 2023) indicates that despite the prohibition of cartels featuring as a central norm of the transplanted market competition system under the auspices of the Europeanization process, the NCAs’ activities to enforce this encountered difficulties due to a dominant collusive culture setting in some post-socialist EU Member States.
By comparing the cartel enforcement track record and institutional capacities (budget, staff) of selected East European NCAs, the hypothesis is tested that – in those countries – cartel prohibition is counter-cultural and that enforcing it provokes competition system instability or decline in the long run. The concept of institutional resilience is used to explain the apparent differences between the post-socialist EU Member States in this respect.