By signing the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the European Communities, Croatia has undertaken to align its legal system with European Community law. This obligation concerns, first of all, areas of law that are crucial for the functioning of the European internal market, including, above all, antitrust law. The subject of this study is the process of harmonization of Croatian antitrust law with the competition rules of the European Community.
To this end, the development of Croatian antitrust law up to January 1, 2007, as well as its application by the Croatian antitrust authority, the Agency for the Protection of Market Competition (Agencija za zaštitu tržišnog natjecanja), and by the courts is analyzed in a comparative legal manner.
In particular, the study examines whether the Croatian Antitrust Authority and the Croatian courts apply the same criteria as the EU Commission and the European courts when assessing competition-related conduct under national antitrust law.
The analysis covers all three pillars of antitrust law: the prohibition of restrictive agreements, the prohibition of abuse of market power and the control of anticompetitive mergers, and in each case both substantive and procedural law. At the same time, this publication continues a series of studies tracing the process of approximation of the national competition rules of the new Member States and future accession states.
These studies are intended not only to satisfy a scholarly interest in the development of competition law in Central Europe, but also to meet the information needs of practitioners, which will continue to grow with the increasing integration of Central European economies into the Common Market.
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