Katrine Lillerud

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 18 (2019), Issue 3, Page 239 - 248

National registers on individual aid grants above €500 000 became mandatory from 1 July 2016. The European Commission hopes the registers will promote compliance, raise awareness on aid granted and function as a disciplinary measure. They count on the registers to ensure better control at the national level, by incentivising beneficiaries to comply and by providing enough information for competitors to check whether aid was lawfully granted. This article provides a case study of how the national registers function in Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. The three European Economic Area States are an interesting case study as they are the only countries that have opted for their own national transparency registers, whilst the EU Member States all use the Commission’s portal. The findings show that the transparency registers currently do not provide the information required for competitors to assess the compatibility of an aid measure with the internal market. Almost all the published aid measures lack a link to the national legal basis or the granting authorities’ decision on the individual aid measure. These shortcomings are easily corrected. However, if left unattended, they arguably render block exempted aid unlawful. Currently, the effect of the national registers appears to be that they induce competitors to apply for aid rather than litigate on it. Keywords: Ex post evaluation; Block exemptions; National transparency registers; Individual aid; Privatization of State aid enforcement; Transparency communication

Hans Friederiszick, Ela Głowicka, Linda Gratz, Simone Lünenbürger, Andreas Rosenfeld

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 17 (2018), Issue 4, Page 509 - 524

The obligation to carry out an ex post evaluation of certain State aid measures was introduced in the European Union in 2014. This obligation represents an important element of the broader State Aid Modernisation initiative of DG Competition. In this article, we offer guidance, both from a legal and an economic perspective, on when an ex post evaluation is required, which methods are available and which methods are actually considered by Member States. More specifically, we propose a ‘traffic light system’, supporting a self-assessment of whether an ex post evaluation is required for a specific measure or not. Furthermore, we review the 24 evaluation plans which were approved by the European Commission by August 2018, with respect to the proposed approaches to the measurement of direct and indirect effects, appropriateness and proportionality. We find that the most common method considered by Member States in their evaluation plans is the econometric estimation of differences-in-differences. Keywords: State aid ex post evaluation; Environmental aid; Econometric estimation methods; Evaluation plans.

Nicole Robins, Hannes Geldof

European State Aid Law Quarterly, Volume 17 (2018), Issue 4, Page 494 - 508

The EU’s State aid modernisation reforms introduced a role for ex post evaluations of aid schemes. State aid evaluation provides an opportunity to continuously improve the effectiveness and efficiency of aid schemes to ensure that their positive impact outweighs possible distortions to competition and trade. Traditionally, the role for an extensive analysis of the impact of aid on competition has been limited compared with other areas of competition policy, such as merger control, and assessments of anticompetitive agreements or abuse of dominance. The European Commission therefore asked Oxera to develop an economic framework that can be used to assess the competitive effects of aid, and to gain further insights into the actual impact of aid on competition. Oxera’s study may have significant implications for future State aid control. This article discusses the economic framework developed by Oxera as well as insights from Oxera’s study into the main drivers of the likely impact of aid on competition.