Competition Policy within the Coordinated and Hierarchical Market Tradition: The Case of Germany and France

We discuss German and French competition policy in relation to the Hierarchical and Coordinated free market models. It is shown that both policies initially fitted well to the Hierarchical model, but over time transformed to a system primarily compatible with the Coordinated free market philosophy. We furthermore argue that this transformation is not (yet) complete in the sense that both the German and the French government can still intervene directly in competition cases concerning market structure