Perrot, Anne --- "Do National Champions Have Anything to do with Economics?" [2010] ELECD 366; in Mateus, M. Abel; Moreira, Teresa (eds), "Competition Law and Economics" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Competition Law and Economics

Editor(s): Mateus, M. Abel; Moreira, Teresa

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848449992

Section: Chapter 18

Section Title: Do National Champions Have Anything to do with Economics?

Author(s): Perrot, Anne

Number of pages: 7

Extract:

18. Do national champions have
anything to do with economics?
Anne Perrot

In October 2006, the SNCF, the French national railway operator,
announced that it had chosen the Canadian firm Bombardier to produce
some of the motors for its trains, rather than Alstom, the French competi-
tor involved in the same tender offer. This choice has been denounced by
a number of political or business leaders as evidence of culpable economic
`antipatriotism'. The message was relayed by most media without much
dispute. The fact that Bombardier proposed the best offer, allowing SNCF
thus to build better quality trains at a lower cost and finally to offer a
better service to consumers, was found a second order argument compared
to the absence of `national preference' that should have prevailed, at least
according to this view. Moreover, most commentators also claimed that
the public authorities should have intervened in order to correct what they
seemed to find a `public bad', that is, the result of a competitive process
involving world operating firms.
This is only the most recent chapter of the long and conflicting relation-
ship that public opinion has sometimes had with the functioning of market
economies, especially in France, and with the related idea that competition
is a bad, the protection of national champions good, and that, in any case,
the government is a wiser decision-maker than the market in the economic
field.
The purpose of this chapter is to confront some of the most often
expressed views in ...