Market adjustments, Competition Law and the Covid-19 Pandemic

Frédéric Jenny

Concurrentialiste blog

Guest article by Frédéric Jenny on Thibault Schrepel’s Concurrentialiste blog

“The Covid-19 economic crisis was, first, caused by a cataclysmic exogenous shock which has led to brutal spikes in the demand for products needed to limit the expansion of the pandemic. In many countries, general confinement measures were adopted because they were deemed the only possibility to contain the pandemic given the lack of availability of the equipment or products required to block the spread of the disease.

As a result, shortages appeared for essential goods and demand collapsed on a large number of markets both because of the physical impossibility for consumers to access stores and because of the constraints imposed on suppliers by confinement.

The question we want to focus on is how competition authorities have adjusted their antitrust enforcement to these new market conditions and what this crisis has meant for market competition.

…”