EurActiv.com reports on last week's summit meeting of ministers from the Member States to discuss national measures to help the car industry. The Commission's spokesman cited the block exemption as one of the possibilities for helping the industry, in addition to the various types of financial support available from other sources.
I took the view right from the start of the block exemption project, in 1980 when the first drafts started to circulate, that competition law was perhaps the only instrument of industrial policy available to the Commission. The block exemption could be used to achieve a great deal more than just regulating dealer agreements, and of course since then the scope of the regulation has increased to cover spare parts manufacture and disclosure of technical information.
But its effectiveness as an instrument of industrial policy will surely be attenuated if - as is the current general drift of Commission thinking - it is reduced to something much smaller and less ambitious. Removing dealer protection (or "flanking") provisions will deprive the block exemption of a lot of its effectiveness. Even if the abuses currently singled out for special attention in the Regulation can still be dealt with under general competition law principles, that's a slow and inefficient way to handle the matter.
On the other hand, what could be written into a new block exemption that might help save the industry?
I took the view right from the start of the block exemption project, in 1980 when the first drafts started to circulate, that competition law was perhaps the only instrument of industrial policy available to the Commission. The block exemption could be used to achieve a great deal more than just regulating dealer agreements, and of course since then the scope of the regulation has increased to cover spare parts manufacture and disclosure of technical information.
But its effectiveness as an instrument of industrial policy will surely be attenuated if - as is the current general drift of Commission thinking - it is reduced to something much smaller and less ambitious. Removing dealer protection (or "flanking") provisions will deprive the block exemption of a lot of its effectiveness. Even if the abuses currently singled out for special attention in the Regulation can still be dealt with under general competition law principles, that's a slow and inefficient way to handle the matter.
On the other hand, what could be written into a new block exemption that might help save the industry?
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