CYIL vol. 13 (2022)

CYIL 13 ȍ2022Ȏ IMPACT OF COVIDǧ19 ON COMPETITION LAW AND POLICY by the Commission in its statement on competition law enforcement during the pandemic, known as the Temporary Antitrust Framework: 3 “The COVID-19 outbreak is a severe public health emergency for citizens and societies. It is also a major and unprecedented shock to the global and Union economies. This shock affects the whole economy through different channels and in different ways. There is a general supply shock resulting from the disruption of supply chains, combined with an asymmetric demand shock caused by either an abrupt decline in consumer demand for certain products and services or a steep rise in demand for other products and services, notably those related to the health sector (including e.g. pharmaceutical companies, medical equipment producers, and their distributors). There is also uncertainty at this stage on both the duration and intensity of the shock , which mainly rest on factors that are not all in the control of undertakings, but rather on decisions by public authorities, driven inter alia by public health considerations”. 4 As in the past, it had also been argued during the COVID-19 pandemic that the antitrust rules should be relaxed in order to enable the producers of crucial medical equipment to boost their output and effectively allocate scarce resources. The first aim of this article is to introduce the measures actually taken. Before the supply had increased and saturated the markets, the increased demand and panic-shopping of certain commodities, e.g. the face masks, frequently led to enormous increases in prices; could the antitrust rules have been employed to tackle this problem? At the same time, the procedures of competition authorities had to adapt to the new situations during lockdowns, with no physical presence at the authority’s premises or impossibility to conduct on-site inspections. Again, our aim is to outline the measures adopted in this regard. This article should however not be perceived as a purely historical one. Our aim is not only to answer the questions posed above, but also to assess, how effective they were, and crucially, to consider whether some of them should be maintained also in “normal” times. Other crises are looming over the horizon, in particular in the energy and commodity markets, and more broadly, the global recession may be expected in the following years. The last crisis may serve a valuable lesson for tackling them in the future. To achieve these goals, this article will first concentrate on the limitation of antitrust rules during challenging times (Chapter II), then on the suitability of competition law to tackle excessive prices (Chapter III) and finally, on specific measures adapting the public enforcement of competition law to circumstances during the crisis (Chapter IV). We will cover the experience on the EU level, i.e. the policies of the Commission, and of several selected agencies from Central Europe, namely the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia.

3 Communication from the Commission. Temporary Framework for assessing antitrust issues related to business cooperation in response to situations of urgency stemming from the current COVID-19 outbreak (2020/C 116 I/02). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52020XC0408(04). 4 Ibid , paras 1 and 2; emphasis added.

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