The economic impact of enforcement of competition policies on the functioning of EU energy markets : non-technical summary and technical report

This study examines whether EU competition policy enforcement has led to stronger competition in European gas and electricity markets and hence lower prices, higher investment and improved productivity. Specifically, the study analyses the impact of competition policy enforcement on shortrun measures of intensity of competition such as profit elasticity and productivity dispersion (at sectorcountry level); and medium and long-term competitive outcomes such as investment and productivity (at firm-sector-country level). The main result of this analysis is that EU merger policy enforcement is consistently and significantly related to better market outcomes, especially in low-regulated markets. The impacts of the EU's anti-trust enforcement and state aid control on the other hand, are not statistically significant. The study also empirically evaluates the price effects of two individual competition policy enforcement cases using the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach. The first case study analyses the impact of the Commission's case against E.ON (2008) for its alleged abuse of dominant position in the German wholesale electricity market. Specifically, this case study examines the impact of the Commission's Decision on wholesale electricity prices, using daily data on peak and off-peak prices from the European Energy Exchange (EEX). The results show that the Commission's Decision, by affecting competition in the EEX, led to a reduction in wholesale electricity prices in Germany. To determine whether wholesale price reductions were eventually passed on to consumers by electricity suppliers, we further analysed retail electricity prices using highly disaggregated data (monthly data at zip code level) purchased from the German price comparison website Verivox. The results suggest that the Commission's Decision - by reducing market power upstream and thereby lowering wholesale prices - might have also contributed to reducing prices downstream. The second case study examines the price effects of the Gaz de France (GDF)-Suez merger, approved by the European Commission in November 2006. The results show that the merger and associated remedies had a significant downward impact on wholesale gas prices at the Zeebrugge Hub in Belgium. This could suggest that the remedies were effective in limiting the potential anticompetitive effects of the merger.