Chillin'Competition

This blog has been neglected to such an extent in the past few months that some of you got in touch to ask whether everything was OK. Fortunately, the only reason I did not get around to sharing thoughts more often is that I was absorbed in the writing of The New Law of State Aid and Subsidies.

As the very cover suggests, it is the second volume of ‘The New’ trilogy, the first instalment of which was The New EU Competition Law. If you were wondering, I hope it will be followed by a monograph on merger control, which is also undergoing fundamental transformations.

I submitted the manuscript to Hart in the early days of summer, and The New Law of State Aid and Subsidies already has a dedicated webpage: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/new-law-of-state-aid-and-subsidies-9781509990306/.

The new instalment of the trilogy shares the philosophy of the preceding one: a relatively short, affordable (it will come out in paperback from the beginning) and hopefully accessible volume that is modular by design (in the sense that individual chapters can be read independently of one another).

This is a book that I have been meaning to write for a long time. In more ways than one, it is the fruit of many years teaching State aid and subsidies at the LSE Law School. Providing a conceptual framework to convey the essence of the discipline to students approaching it for the first time is a real challenge. Some chapters (such as the one devoted to selectivity) reflect many hours of class discussions and are no doubt enriched by students’ contributions.

Other chapters seek to trace the various ways in which the law of State aid and subsidies is undergoing fundamental changes. There are, as I explain in the introduction to the book, at least three ways in which this field can be said to be ‘new’:

First, the law is new in a literal sense. The EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation and the UK Subsidy Control Act are novel pieces of legislation that share some features with the EU State aid regime but also depart from it in a number of respects. There is a dedicated chapter addressing each of these developments (and have been able to incorporate, inter alia, the new draft guidelines on foreign subsidies).

The law is also new in another sense. Following what I call the ‘permacrisis’ of EU State aid policy (where COVID was followed by the invasion of Ukraine, and this against a background of deglobalisation) a ‘new normal’ has emerged (epitomised by the Clean Industrial Deal Framework) that suggests that it may no longer be possible to turn back the clock to the pre-COVID era.

Finally, the tax rulings saga, the symbolic culminating point of which is the Court judgment in Apple (delivered exactly a year ago), ventured into issues that tested the boundaries of Article 107(1) TFEU and, more generally, the ability of the regime to address harmful tax competition. The saga has been so central to the development of EU State aid law that there is a whole chapter devoted to it.

I very much hope we will be able to celebrate the launch of the book, in London, Bruges and beyond, in the new year, and look forward to sharing those moments with many of you. Stay tuned in the meantime!