The provisions of EU law that are relevant to health insurance are either competition law and state aid, or public procurement. Which regime is applied depends mainly on the definition of the undertaking. At the same time, the internal market rules are also relevant, notably the non-life...

In the EU harmonisation of healthcare has long been elusive. Article 168 paragraph 7 TFEU even forms a sector-specific subsidiarity clause. Meanwhile the ECJ handed down a series of judgments concerning patients' rights to reimbursement for healthcare consumed in other Member States. An initial...

The Netherlands is an early mover in healthcare liberalisation. It has a dual policy towards competition enforcement in the sector: not only the general competition rules (the prohibitions on cartels and the abuse of dominance, and merger control) but also rules of sector specific competition...

In its BUPA Case of February 2008 the Court of First Instance set a new standard for assessing whether public service compensation constitutes a state aid and/or is covered by the exception for services of general economic interest. At issue was risk equalisation between providers of private...

This paper aims, first, to chart the establishment case law of the European court and its impact on the “supply side” of healthcare provision. This shows that the development of this line of case law is slow and piecemeal: although on the one hand non-discriminatory rules are now caught by...

Economic regulation by independent regulatory authorities is justified in a legal sense by theories based on delegation, (partial) ministerial responsibility and judicial review, or more recently on regulatory contracts and stakeholder representation. While none of these models is fully...

Economic analysis has contributed to a better understanding and a better functioning of law at different levels of generality. As far as legal reasoning is concerned, these contributions fall into two large groups. Economics in legal reasoning concerns arguments about the purposes and...

There is a considerable urgency in addressing the impact stemming from the production of certain agricultural commodities on ecosystems and local communities. Forest-risk commodities (FRCs) such as cocoa, coffee, palm oil, rubber, soy, maize and beef generate negative impacts on deforestation,...

This paper takes stock of the many private and public instruments enacted transnationally to tackle the pressing problem of deforestation, ecosystem conversion and associated human rights violations caused by international demand and trade in agricultural commodities. The paper argues that...