Overview   Conference

In the context of the review of the Merger Guidelines, as a follow-up to the public consultation, DG Competition is organizing two interactive technical stakeholder workshops on key aspects of the review of the Merger Guidelines. The aim of the workshops is to gather views on these important topics of the review and discuss how they could be incorporated in the draft Merger Guidelines.

1. Workshop 1: Scale, Competitiveness and Efficiencies. Brussels, 4 December 2025, 9.00 – 17:00 CET
2. Workshop 2: Innovation, Investment, Sustainability, Labour and Democracy. Brussels, 20 January 2026, 9.00 – 17:00 CET

To mark its 20th Anniversary, the Chief Economist Team is organising a conference that will bring together leading experts to discuss and reflect about competition economics in a changing world. The event will be a half-day conference (exclusively in-person, with no streaming available) on Thursday 15 May 2025, with opening and closing remarks by Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera and Director-General Olivier Guersent, a keynote lecture by Chief Competition Economist Prof. Emanuele Tarantino, as well as roundtables where contributors from academia, private sector and public sector will discuss about the contribution of economics to public policies, with an emphasis in competition and industrial policies.

On 4 March 2025, Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera hosted her first Youth Policy Dialogue on Empowering Young Talent and Improving Gender Balance in the EU. The event was an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas with the younger generation and listen to their insightful contributions. Here you can see the highlights of event. For more information about the Dialogue, please click here, and for the recording of the whole event, please click here.

You can listen to DG Competition Massimiliano Kadar’s insightful intervention on the European Commission’s perspective on future developments at the event 'The Reform of Article 102 TFEU: Evolution or Revolution?'. This event was hosted by the Inclusive Competition Forum (ICF) in collaboration with the Centre for Law, Economics and Society at University College London (UCL).

The seventh episode of Let’s Talk Competition will focus on the past and future of Competition policy. It will be the occasion to look at the work done by the European Commission over the past years, but also to analyse the challenges and pressing issues that the next mandate will have to address.
Lewis Crofts, Editor-at-Large at MLex, will moderate the debate. Three renowned experts will take part in the discussion: Olivier Guersent, Director-General of the Directorate-General for Competition; Vanessa Turner, Senior Adviser on Competition at the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC); Natalie Harsdorf-Borsch, Director-General of the Austrian Federal Competition Authority.

DG COMP's Director General Olivier Guersent was interviewed for Rivalry, the Innovation Podcast of the GW Competition & Innovation Lab. In the conversation, hosted by professor Aurelien Portuese, Olivier talked about a variety of topics, including his path to become the head of DG Competition, tech giants or the Digital Markets Act.

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the EU Merger Regulation (Regulation 139/2004), DG Competition organised a conference that brought together leading experts to discuss and reflect on the impact of EU merger control over the last decades.
In case you missed it, you can watch the recorded debate of the full-day conference.

On December 7th, the fourth episode of the Markets for People series (titled “Why do we need competition?”) took place in Brno, Czechia.
In case you missed it, you can watch the recorded debate (original version in Czech also available!).
More episodes of the Markets for People series will come, so watch this space!

Today, October 20th, the third episode of the series “How can we make markets fairer?” took place in Salamanca, Spain.
In case you missed it, you can watch the recorded debate.
More episodes of the How can we make markets fairer? series will come, so watch this space!

This third episode of the Markets for People itinerant debate series took place on Friday, 20 October 2023 in Salamanca, Spain (here is the series portal and here the debate page)
Ana García, from the Directorate-General for Competition of the European Commission moderated the debate. The full debate is available on DG Competition’s YouTube channel (here in English and here in Spanish).

Did you miss the third episode of Let’s Talk Competition on DMA? No problem, you can watch it anytime on DG COMP Youtube channel. A great panel composed by Alberto Bacchiega, Director for Digital Platforms at the DG COMP, Vanessa Turner, Senior Advisor for Competition at the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), and Inge Graef, Associate Professor of Competition Law at Tilburg University, discussed about the impact of this groundbreaking new EU law for gatekeepers and the way to go until compliance for companies in March 2024.

On 27 October, 2022, Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager hosted Making Markets Work for People, a conference that reviewed and debated the impact of competition policy on people’s lives.
In case you missed it, you can watch the complete video of the recorded sessions.

On 9 September 2022 from 10:00 - 17:00, the Commission is organising a virtual stakeholder meeting open to environmental NGOs, industry representatives (including small businesses) and other interested organisations.
The aim of the meeting is to discuss and receive feedback on the implications of the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee findings in case ACCC/C/2015/128 on state aid and on possible options for addressing this issue.

DG Competition invites you to the virtual workshop Estimating the 'costs of non-competition' for the EU economy on 23 June 2022. The workshop will be hosted by the Chief Economist and the Principal Adviser for economic ex-post evaluation of DG Competition.

The Africa-EU Competition Week will take place online over the course of five days, from 14 to 23 February 2022.
Leading academics, practitioners and officials from EU institutions, EU Member States and African officials will take part in the event, which will cover a wide range of topics, including policy and enforcements in the field of cartels, abuse of dominance, mergers and State aid.
Up to 100 participants from African public sector bodies, including national, regional and African Union-level institutions, are expected to join the event.

DG Competition will hold a conference for Young Experts on 3 February 2022. “Taking Competition Policy into the Future” will give a platform to the competition experts and scholars of tomorrow.

On 3 February 2022, DG Competition hosted a half-day conference titled Taking Competition Policy into the Future. In addition to digital and green issues, the conference tabled a broader debate on competition policy’s evolution over the next decade. 400 participants from 47 countries registered to the hybrid conference and 1,000 watched the webstream. Executive Vice-President Vestager gave introductory remarks and Director-General Guersent closed the event. Click the link below to watch the proceedings again.