This paper provides a survey of European antitrust law enforcement since its foundation in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. We present a complete overview and statistical analysis of all formal Commission decisions adopted up to 2004 under Articles 81, 82 and 86 of the European Community Treaty. In the period March 1964 to December 2004, there have been 538 formal Commission decisions on antitrust in total, of which in 166 cases were appealed. We report a range of summary statistics concerning report route, investigation duration, length of the decision, decision type, imposed fines, number of parties, sector classification, and Commissioner and Director General responsible. The statistics are linked to changes in legislation and administrative implementation, thereby providing a historical overview that summarizes the Commission's work in the area of antitrust. The paper further estimates the determinants of probability that a finding of an infringement is appealed against with the European Court of Justice.
This paper provides a survey of European antitrust law enforcement since its foundation in the Treaty of Rome of 1957 up to and including 2004. We present a complete overview and statistical analysis of all 538 formal Commission decisions under Articles 81, 82, and 86 of the European Community Treaty. We report a range of summary statistics concerning report route, investigation duration, length of the decision, decision type, imposed fines, number of parties, sector classification, nationality, and Commissioner and Director General responsible. The statistics are linked to changes in legislation and administrative implementation, thereby providing an historical overview that summarizes the Commission's work in the area of antitrust. One or more appeals were filed with respect to 161 of the 538 decisions. We estimate We thank Joris Bijvoet, Norman Bremer, Corinne Dussart-Lefret, Francesco Russo, and Ida Wendt for their assistance in systematically collecting the data that underlie our analyses. Kati Cseres, Vivek Ghosal, John Kwoka, Bruce Lyons, Francesco Russo, Floris Vogelaar, Wouter Wils, the editor, and two referees provided useful comments. We also are indebted to participants at EARIE the determinants of the size of the imposed fine and probability of appeal when an infringement has been found.
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