The paper provides new evidence on proxy indicators of market power for major European countries. The data shows moderately increasing average industry concentration over the last two decades, a considerably increasing proportion of high concentration industries, and an overall tendency towards...

The Directorate General for Competition at the European Commission enforces competition law in the areas of antitrust, merger control, and state aids. This year's article provides first a general presentation of the role of the Chief Competition Economist's team and surveys some of the main...

A significant body of empirical research has documented a structural increase in margins across a wide range of industries and countries. This article analyses the potential implications of this trend for merger control. We argue that structural increases in firms' pricing power call for a...

Over the last years, several reports highlighted the market power of very large online platforms that are gatekeeping intermediaries between businesses and consumers, and the difficulty for classic competition policy tools to deal effectively with anti-competitive practices in these platforms....

The population of the region is growing at 2.4 percent a year, second only to the Africa region, and should double in size in about 30 years. Regional growth would appear even more rapid were growth not offset by slow and even negative growth in the Eastern and Southern European countries...