European Merger Control

The first decennium of merger control under European competition law offers an enticing stimulus for all kinds of evaluations of the Merger Regulation's running time, in particular of the economic feasibility of its rules and their application. An economic analysis of the Regulation allows for a positive assessment of the envisioned effects, while also enabling normative statements on how to improve the rules' workability given an umbrella of goals to be achieved. This study was inspired by one of the Merger Regulation's more controversial issues, as surrounding the taking into account of efficiencies resulting from a merger under scrutiny. Currently hardly featured in the evaluation process, it will be shown that efficiencies carry the potential to move to the centre of stage in those competitively "close" cases, pending prohibition because of the underlying amalgamation's latent anticompetitive effects, but at the same time characterised by a strong synergistic content.