Thursday, April 14, 2016
Assembly D (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
This paper aims to critically re-assess the neo-liberal political and economic doctrine from the perspective of competition law, economics and policy. It is advanced that the current rhetoric used by policy makers and enforcers of competition law and economics has been fixated on the promotion of economic efficiency and fierce competition based on free markets at the expense of other sensible social values through inflexibility and a reductionist presumption about how markets should effectively work in practice. The emblematic shift of competition policy towards fostering fierce, even aggressive forms of, competition driven massively by economic efficiency has been at the cornerstone of the EU Commission's enforcement agenda. The firm belief that promoting efficiency will help inefficient market players to leave the market has its own fallacy. In particular, an exit of larger or smaller businesses is always associated with their downsizing or restructuring and, as a result, with job losses. Such negative consequences have been silently neglected through an exclusivist and dogmatic interpretation of competition policy that serves economic calculus, rather than the social order. This tendency has blatantly remained mainstream. Furthermore, the paper argues that over the past years of competition enforcement, no recourse has been made to reverse the negative social impact of fierce competition through jobs creation, e.g. rewarding those entrepreneurs that are efficient at job creation. Finally, the paper wishes to ask the following: should efficiency always translate into jobs destruction, then why should it ever be afforded such a prominent role in any policy rhetoric?
