Sixty Years of EU State Aid Law and Policy: Analysis and Assessment

If an EU industrial policy can be said to exist, its contours may be found in the complex and evolving concept of State aid. Because approaching any State aid issue can be fraught with multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations, an in-depth analysis of the rationales, initiatives, and regulations that constitute the State aid system is much needed. In response to this need, this book provides a fine-grained clarifying context through which recent reforms, policy shifts, and judicial decisions concerning State aid can be understood and applied to specific situations. Focusing on the impacts of landmark cases and policy developments leading up to a deeply informed critique of the current State Aid Modernisation Programme, the authors cover such issues and topics as the following: – linkages to other established and evolving EU common policies and common strategies; – effect of EU State aid rules in the expanding geopolitical regions of EU influence; – interaction with the WTO Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Agreement; – the problem of a `subsidies culture’; – how the European Commission’s notion of `bad’ State aid has evolved; – effect of EU policy imperatives (e.g., environmental goals) which implicitly argue for increased subsidisation; – nexus with EU tax harmonisation; – competition among undertakings versus competition among Member State policies; and – nature of the quasi-devolution of regulatory responsibilities to EU Member States. This book is a crucially important source of both theoretical enlightenment and practical wisdom that will greatly enhance confident progress through any legal matter involving EU State aid rules. It will prove of immeasurable value to practitioners, in-house counsel, policymakers, and academics for many years to come.

About the Author :
Dr Eugene Stuart is an Irish a lawyer and public policy advisor, both in Ireland and internationally. He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Belgrade, a Masters' in European Law from University College Dublin, an M.A. in Public Policy and Administration from Trinity College Dublin, and he is a graduate of the Irish Institute of Public Administration. He also holds two Post-Graduate Diplomas in International Human Rights Law from Turku University, Finland. With some twenty-five years' experience at the Irish Ministry for Economy, Dr Stuart's professional experience covers the full range of an Economic Ministry's brief, including its regulatory areas and developmental functions. In the early 1990s, Dr Stuart worked at the European Commission in several fields, including Competition Policy, and subsequently was the first Head of the State Aid Department at the Irish Ministry for Economy. Since 1996, he has worked as an international legal and policy advisor in various capacities in over twenty different countries. In the State aid field, he has contributed to the development of State aid regulatory systems in Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Moldova and the Russian Federation. He was appointed as EU High Level Policy Advisor on Public Procurement to the Moldovan Government in 2011. In addition, Dr Stuart has participated in a range of important international negotiations including those at European Union level and at the OECD in regard to State aid reforms and the international monitoring of public supports to industry. He has also contributed many international conferences and journals in regard to competition law and policy, State aid and subsidies controls, company law, consumer protection and industrial development. Iana Roginska-Green is Ukrainian and graduated from the National Law Academy of Ukraine with an LLM Diploma in 2008. She started her career in the State Department of Legal Approximation in the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine as a specialist on State aid, Public Procurement, Competition, and Company Law. In 2011, Iana Roginska-Green graduated from the Estonian School of Diplomacy in Tallinn and in 2012, from the College of Europe with a Master's in European Single Market Law. Her Master's thesis addressed the "Creation of the State aid monitoring system in Ukraine according to the acquis communautaire." From 2012 to 2013, Ms Roginska-Green worked on legal research for the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee in Policy Department of Economic and Scientific Policy of the European Parliament. In 2013, she became a co-founder and Director of the Research Institute on Legal Approximation - a non-profit research organisation aimed at helping to improve policy and decision-making in Ukraine through research and analysis. Mrs Roginska-Green is the co-author of a number of European Parliament publications on the main freedoms of the Internal Market and of the Study for the European Parliament onStreaming and online access to content(EP, 13 March 2014). Moreover, she is a co-author of a number of books on State aid in Ukraine, in particular, of the firstCommentary to the Law of Ukraine on State aid(2017).