IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jcomle/v6y2010i4p853-878..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Taking Politics Out Of Mergers: A Review Of Irish Experience

Author

Listed:
  • Patrick Massey

Abstract

The Competition Act, 2002, radically altered merger control in Ireland, removing political involvement and assigning responsibility for reviewing mergers to an independent agency, the Competition Authority. This paper reviews the first 5 years of this new regime. The reform has increased transparency and made competition the sole criteria for the evaluation of mergers. There is evidence that most mergers notified have no competitive effect within Ireland, suggesting that the legislation is too broad in scope. Although relatively few notified mergers raised any competition concerns, this paper identifies problems in the Competition Authority's analysis in a number of these cases. The Authority has tended to rely on qualitative rather than quantitative evidence. In some instances, its analysis is inconsistent with economic theory. This applies particularly to its analysis of efficiencies. This paper therefore recommends that the Authority urgently review its merger procedures and introduce additional checks and balances in the merger review process. In addition, it should review its approach to efficiencies. This paper also suggests possible legislative reforms to reduce the number of unnecessary notifications and provide third parties with a right of appeal against decisions by the Authority.

Suggested Citation

  • Patrick Massey, 2010. "Taking Politics Out Of Mergers: A Review Of Irish Experience," Journal of Competition Law and Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 6(4), pages 853-878.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:jcomle:v:6:y:2010:i:4:p:853-878.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/joclec/nhq010
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • K21 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Antitrust Law
    • L12 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Monopoly; Monopolization Strategies
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L41 - Industrial Organization - - Antitrust Issues and Policies - - - Monopolization; Horizontal Anticompetitive Practices

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jcomle:v:6:y:2010:i:4:p:853-878.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jcle .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.