Merger control in EU and USA

This diploma thesis aims to compare the approaches of EU and USA to the merger control from the point of view of the competition policy. Its goal is to confirm the hypothesis that both these approaches converge, but there are still significant differences. The comparative method was used to achieve this goal. The necessary information was gained from law regulations, academic papers and books. The results is that in the last years, mainly after the reform of merger control in EU in 2004, the definition of the lessening of the effective competition has been converged and the same happened in the field of horizontal mergers. However there are still significant differences in the area of non-horizontal mergers, mainly because the approach of USA is based on the ideas of Chicago school, but the approach of EU is rather based on the post-Chicago economics. Other differences can be found in the fact, that US merger control system is judicial but in EU it is administrative. Apart of that the US antitrust authorities use more economics and econometrics. These findings are also proved by the arguments of EU and USA in the cases GE/Honeywell and DB/NYX, in which both jurisdictions decided differently