"European State Aid Control in the New Member States – The Examples of Poland and the Czech Republic"

This paper analyzes the impact of European state aid control in the new Member states. Two main arguments are derived from comparisons of state aid policies over time and across countries: First, changes in CEECs’ state aid policies can mainly be traced backed to the (anticipated) impact of post-accession state aid control by the European Commission rather than to accession conditionality. Second, despite strong tendencies of policy convergence we observe persistently different national strategies in dealing with European state aid control. More generally, studying the domestic impact of European state aid control provides us with a telling example of the peculiarities of complying with rules of negative integration