CoRe - European Competition and Regulatory Law Review

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The search returned 2 results.

Behrang Kianzad

European Competition and Regulatory Law Review, Volume 6 (2022), Issue 3, Page 207 - 221

Despite being heavily regulated, the pharmaceutical sector in Europe has in recent years noted many enforcement decisions against excessive pharmaceutical pricing as an anti-competitive practice under Article 102(a) TFEU. Although described as a ‘rarity’ in competition law in most parts of the doctrine, numerous excessive pricing cases have emerged in Italy, UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands in recent years, but also on the European Commission level. The European competition authority adopted its first excessive pricing commitment decision against a pharmaceutical undertaking (Aspen) in April 2021. Take into account the manifold points of contention in the literature on excessive pricing, concerning the normative issue of preventing supra-competitive pricing on part of dominant undertakings. Add the tension between competition law and sector regulation;, as well as the practical issue of calculating cost, prices and profits for the purpose of finding out the ‘excess’ and ‘unfairness’, and one can see the Aspen case is of particular importance for future cases. Keywords: excessive pricing; Article 102; pharmaceutical pricing; competition law; pricing of medicines; sector regulation, law and economics

Kiran Desai

European Competition and Regulatory Law Review, Volume 5 (2021), Issue 1, Page 11 - 23

Policy debate in the EU and international fora and institutions are leading to proposed changes to competition law as applied to the technology and in particular digital sectors. A review of the proposals identifies two groups, first, those that are a more aggressive application of competition law and second, those addressing non-traditional goals, such as data privacy. The EU’s Digital Markets Act is an example of the latter, while a change to the EU Merger Regulation is an example of the former. The proposed changes are open to criticism, for example because they create a differential application of competition law to one sector compared to others and there are definitional challenges. Furthermore, competition economic analysis, with its emphasis on consumer welfare,may need to be broadened to enable a normative and theoretical consistency between the current laws and the proposed changes. In addition, where the changes are to address goals not susceptible to such analysis, such as human rights, lawyers will need to be open to adding arguments based on other jurisprudential theories to support their cases. Keywords: competition; digital; proposals; objective; economics

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