Priority setting The neglected cornerstone of effective EU competition law enforcement

In our study, ‘Policy Report: Priority setting in EU and national competition law enforcement’ (“Report”), we conducted a systematic and comprehensive mapping of the procedural and substantive rules and practices that define the way competition authorities of 27 EU Member States, the United Kingdom, and the EU Commission set their priorities. We defined priority setting broadly, as the legal competence and de facto ability of competition authorities to choose which cases to pursue and which to disregard. The data was collected by combining desk research of the publicly available legislation and policy documents in each jurisdiction with a written questionnaire completed by officials of the competition authorities and semi-structured interviews with those officials. The Report presents a new typology of priority setting and evaluates the priority setting practices against a set of administrative law principles of good governance.

This paper summarises our main arguments by discussing the influence of Regulation 1/2003 on the setting of enforcement priorities in terms of the removal of the notification obligation (Section 2); effectiveness (Section 3); and uniformity (Section 4).