This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Programme call 2025. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
Often described as a ‘laboratory of change,’ the Central and East European (CEE) countries experienced profound changes in their economic, institutional, and legislative frameworks over the last three decades. The progression toward market processes in countries once committed to central economic planning was considered ‘one of the most extraordinary events of our time.’ Competition and competition policy played a central role in the development of markets, particularly in assisting and promoting the process of economic transition.
The evolution of competition systems in CEE countries was conditioned by the Europeanisation process, which influenced the conceptualisation of legal rules and the design of relevant institutions. Cartel prohibition was one of the key legal transplants, having the capacity to transform ‘economic culture’ from the planned to the market economy paradigm. Effectively, the role of EU law in this context was to ‘transnationalise’ market values.
It is almost taken for granted that the economic culture transformation in CEE has been completed. However, COMPO 1.0 research project argues that this is not the case. The project suggests that the national competition authorities’ (NCAs) fight against cartels should be taken as a litmus test in this regard. Recent empirical research finds that only a minority of CEE countries can claim a consistent cartel enforcement track record. On the contrary, many NCAs struggle considerably with detecting, prosecuting and sanctioning cartels, with institutional independence and leadership challenges impacting their effectiveness.
Based on these insights, COMPO 1.0 hypothesises that weaknesses in cartel enforcement indicate that the collusive behaviour paradigm, inherited from central planning, has not yet been abandoned in CEE countries. More precisely, the project proposes:
(a) that weaknesses in cartel enforcement reveal a lacking/limited ability of NCAs to contribute to effecting economic culture transformation;
(b) that the NCAs’ cartel enforcement struggles indicate a lacking embeddedness of competition law’s foundational values in context of CEE economic culture.
For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.