Over the past decade, Austria has made considerable efforts to open up its product markets to competition. Besides the early liberalisation of the energy and telecommunication markets, measures were taken to eliminate barriers to market access and initiate a move towards administrative...

Both industry and private households have profited substantially from the liberalisation of the electricity markets, the former, however, to a significantly greater extent than the latter, which points at different competition intensities in the two markets. The favourable development of...

By the 2002 amendment to the antitrust and competition legislation, the structure of Austria's competition institutions was approximated to European standards, however not without maintaining some specific Austrian peculiarities. Six years of practical application have revealed considerable...

Since the mid-1990s, competition in the Austrian product markets has become markedly more vigorous, driven by "externally induced" competition-oriented structural reforms. In terms of product market regulation, Austria ranks in the middle range in international comparisons. Same as other...

After a long process of catching up and successful integration into the world economy, Austrian industry now ranks among the best in Europe in terms of productivity, with the share of Austrian exports in the world market rising in the long run. The curbing of labour cost increases and the...

This paper argues that the accession to the European Union improves the quality of competition policy via the implementation of pro-competitive policies, especially antitrust and competition policies, embedded in the Community Acquis. We assess this conjecture empirically for the (former)...

Systemic Industrial and Innovation Policy as defined by Aiginger (2007, 2012, 2013) is a very well developed theoretical framework for "real world" industrial policy. SIIP differs decisively from policies of the past, and has been receiving a real-world impetus from both the EU 2020 and the EU...

This paper provides a survey of the effects of market competition in the transition economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The pivotal element of the transition was inter-firm competition, which replaced economic planning as the method to identify demand. Pro-competitive policies that...

An economic analysis of competition in the main local and regional food retail markets in Austria finds that regional market leaders already enjoy a share of more than 30 percent in their respective markets, a situation that prevails in all of Austria with the exception of Burgenland. The...