In times of slow economic recovery, little confidence in the markets, innovations in technology that have brought great benefits to consumers, is there still room for the protection of competition? As Giuliano Amato argued with his usual brilliance on the occasion of his lectio magistralis held yesterday at the Antitrust on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding law, it is not yet the time for the "Requiescat in pace" .
But the principles must be maintained and not applied dogmatically. Amato sees two maintenance needs: the abandonment of a certain ideology which in the XNUMXs led to making industrial policy coincide with competition policy. Today, however, a large current of economic thought considers industrial policy a necessary tool.
To put it in the words of Dan Rodrik, who is one of the most authoritative exponents of that current, in today's world "we must prevent the markets from continuing to do what they do best because this confines a country to its specialization". So the protection of competition must find its compatibility better with industrial policy, but here the discourse brings us straight to Brussels and to the notorious, never as in recent weeks, the Directorate General for Competition.
The initial season of the Antitrust (Amato was its President from 1994 to 1997) deserves credit for having succeeded in spreading a culture of competition in our country and gaining international credibility. That period was accompanied by what was to turn out to be an illusion (also fueled by experiences such as that of Australia that Amato recalled): the expectation that sustained growth rates could come from the development of the competition.
As subsequent events have shown, miracles could not be asked of a law which, in an economic system like ours where the main obstacle to freedom of initiative comes from the barriers to entering the markets, limits itself to forbidding anti-competitive behavior ( abuse of dominant position and cartel agreements).
As highlighted by a large economic literature, it is the freedom of entry that drives the innovation of companies already present on the market and small differences in entry costs, originating from barriers of an administrative nature, can also explain a significant part of the differences in productivity across countries. In Italy, the system of concessions and administrative barriers has remained relatively unscathed over the past twenty-five years and is still deeply rooted today.
The second maintenance requirement originates in the development of the so-called dual markets (two-sided markets) such as that of search engines, freely usable contents on the web, the share economy. The consumer, recalled Amato, has obtained considerable benefits from these developments which are however characterized by the presence of very large operators who, with the "exorbitance" (as he defined it) of their market power and very high profit margins, risk kill the competition.
Here the Antitrust must follow the narrow path between not caging the innovative markets and avoiding the formation of positions of supremacy that remain over time. It is a real challenge: as President Amato admonished: “Times changed, times are difficult; woe to not take it into account." Not everything is played in Rome, of course. In any case good job Professor Pitruzzella.
