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Price gouging of essential items, and the global debate on pricing of vaccines and treatments during the COVID-19 crisis, provide an optimal proxy to revisit the law and economics discourse on excessive pricing as an abuse of dominant position. Beyond a normative soul-searching of the efficiency v fairness debate, this chapter analyses excessive pricing cases during the COVID-19 pandemic in the EU
On 31 January 2018, the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority adopted a decision1 finding the Swedish company generic distributor CD Pharma in breach of Art. 102(a) Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) by abusing its dominant position and having imposed excessive and unfair prices for the drug Syntocinon. The company increased the price of the drug by 2000% in the period Apri
The long-running case,1 which revolved around the brightly colored, fashionable leather boots by iconic Danish designer Ilse Jacobsen, ended with the Danish and European fashion industry on the receiving end of the legal boot. The Danish Supreme Court stopped short of awarding copyright to Ilse Jacobsen as a reward for her ‘free and independent creative effort’ in regard to the design of the now i
Recentmonths have seen intensified global calls for an intellectual propertywaiver of COVID-19 related vaccines, treatments and related products.Where one side of the debate elevates Intellectual Property Rights as on obstacle to affordable and expeditious global access to vaccines and treatments, the other side of the debate points to the existing TRIPS flexibilities such as compulsory licensing,
Case C-372/19 Belgische Vereniging van Auteurs, Componisten en Uitgevers CVBA (SABAM) v Weareone.World BVBA and Wecandance NV, Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (Fifth Chamber) of 25 November 2020 The most recent excessive pricing case considered by Court of Justice of European Union (CJEU) revolved around fees imposed by a national royalty collective society (SABAM) on two Be
The issue of securing access to patented pharmaceutical products has been in the forefront of global legal debate for many years. This debate intensified further following the enactment of the TRIPSTRIPS agreement and the global enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights such as patents through the World Trade Organization. To combat the problem, compulsory licensingCompulsory licensing has been
Petrochemical production is tightly entangled with fossil fuel extraction and constitutes the primary driver of oil demand growth. Therefore, scholars have increasingly started exploring the linkages between fossil fuels and chemicals, tracing their importance for the political economy of energy transitions. A defining feature in the global petrochemical industry is that the majority of the recent
Established in 2015, the Multi-Stakeholder Engagement (MuSE) Consortium is an international network of over 120 individuals interested in stakeholder engagement in research and guidelines. The MuSE group is developing guidance for stakeholder engagement in the development of health and healthcare guideline development. The development of this guidance has included multiple meetings with stakeholde
The prohibition against excessive pricing dates back to the years of Babylonian King Hammurabi. Nevertheless, the prohibition is described by many as being “controversial” and against “mainstream economics”, which is why it should be applied rather sparsely. It has also rather routinely been claimed that the actual number of excessive pricing cases is “scarce”, “limited” and so on. Despite the his
The COVID-19 crisis noted many reports of dramatic price increases of essential items such as face masks, hand sanitisers and disinfectants. Already in March 2020 the Competition Authorities in Europe, by way of a joint statement by European Competition Network and individual public announcements, cautioned against price gouging practices and re-affirmed their commitment to pursue such practices v
Excessive pharmaceutical pricing cases in EU have progressed from a theoretical possibility to becoming a recurrent enforcement reality, following heightened law and policy attention on affordability of medicines. This matter gained considerable momentum in the wake of COVID-19 crisis as result of the increased health spending, with debates on affordability raging at WTO and WIPO levels. Unfair pr
Despite being heavily regulated, the pharmaceutical sector in Europe has in recent years noted many enforcement decisions against excessive pharmaceutical pricing as an anti-competitive practice under Article 102(a) TFEU. Although described as a ‘rarity’ in competition law in most parts of the doctrine, numerous excessive pricing cases have emerged in Italy, UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands in rec
Recent years have seen the dominance of neoclassical, marginalist and welfarist schools of Competition Law and Economics being challenged more vigorously than ever [See two major collecting works on fairness in economics in: Fennell and McAdams (2013) and Cappelen and Tungodden (2019)]. Although the core assumptions of the neoclassical school regarding overt reliance on rationality and efficiency
On 31 January 2018, the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority adopted a decision that found the Swedish company CD Pharma, a generic distributor, to be in breach of Article 102(a) TFEU due to having abused its dominant position and imposed excessive and unfair prices for the drug Syntocinon. The company had increased the price of the drug by 2000% on the Danish market in the period April 2014-On 31 January 2018, the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority adopted a decision that found the Swedish company CD Pharma, a generic distributor, to be in breach of Article 102(a) TFEU due to having abused its dominant position and imposed excessive and unfair prices for the drug Syntocinon. The company had increased the price of the drug by 2000% on the Danish market in the period April 2014-
Both Hungary and Poland have been in the spotlight regarding their democratic backsliding, with Executives exerting control over supposedly independent pillars of democracy, such as courts or the media. While the concerns about these countries also voiced by leaders of European institutions were similar, the resistance against the systematic erosion of judicial independence comes in different form
This introduction develops a theoretical framework for understanding authoritarian backsliding against the backdrop of existing historical and European socio-legal scholarship. It introduces a number of key distinctions to better understand socio-legal variance among autocratisation. Specifically, it highlights the distinction between authoritarian backsliding and complete breakdown of judicial in
Prohibition of excessive pricing belongs to one of the oldest legal constructs in human history. The historical roots and the near-universal codification of the concept of excessive pricing has however not mitigated the contentious quarrel alongside seemingly unreconcilable legal-economic positions. Positions ranging from those denying the very existence of excessive pricing, let alone endorsing e
