Join this event to explore how cross-country pollination can address challenges in competition law systems across Eastern Europe.
In Eastern Europe, the drivers of competition law system evolution at the national level are largely blind spots, both for the research community and key enforcement stakeholders. With some limited exceptions, our knowledge about the challenges faced by ‘the others’ remains obscure, even concerning neighbouring countries, and regional comparative insights are an even more distant target. This adversely affects our capacity to learn from each other and leaves individual competition communities struggling with difficulties, such as dwindling enforcement track records, institutional capacity issues, or political pushbacks. However, in some countries in the region, successes in institution-building, focused and sustained enforcement efforts, and results-driven leadership can be observed. Tolstoian wisdom applies here: all successful competition law systems are alike; each less-than-successful system is unsuccessful in its own way. Cross-country pollination is proposed as a way forward. The focus should be on systematically increasing knowledge about what drives suboptimal evolution in individual jurisdictions and learning from more successful regional peers, thus creating foundational building blocks for more effective enforcement.
At the conference, a new book on judicial review in competition cases (Judicial Review of Competition Law Enforcement in the EU Member States and the UK, eds B. Rodger, O. Brook, M. Bernatt, F. Marcos, A. Outhuijse, Wolters Kluwer, 2024) will be presented, significantly enhancing peer-to-peer learning opportunities on competition law systems at the EU Member State level.
This event is organised in the framework of the EUI Widening Europe Programme. The EUI Widening Europe Programme, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.