European Competition Law Annual 2010: Merger Control in European and Global Perspective

Every year, top-level market regulators, academics and legal and economic practitioners attend the Annual Competition Workshop organised by the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence. The participants are invited to discuss a particular set of critical issues in the field of competition law and policy, and they prepare in advance a written paper and contribute to the oral debate during the proceedings. The meetings are closed to the public, but the entire content of the proceedings - both the oral discussions and the written contributions - are published, following the event, in Hart's European Competition Law Annual series. This is the fifteenth in the ECLA series. It reproduces the debate which in 2010 examined merger control and coincided with the 20-year anniversary of the EU Merger Regulation and a number of important developments internationally in the field of merger policy. The participants discussed legal and economic issues of substantive analysis, procedure, comity and best practices, as well as matters relating to the litigation of merger cases, particularly before the European Courts. The discussion also benefited from the perspectives of policy makers and experts from Canada, Japan, Korea and the United States.