Changes And New Constraints In The Competition Rules Enforcement Due To Accession: The Perception Of The Romanian Companies

Abstract

Many times, in the attempt to win or to maintain an advantageous position on the market, the economic agent will use a whole arsenal of practices (inclusively and mostly from the marketing field), most of them anticompetitive, with a negative impact on the business environment, which also affects the well-being of the consumer. The policy in the field of competition is the one that defines these types of behaviour and penalizes them depending on the importance of their negative impact, by creating a complex and coherent legislative and institutional mechanism. The right enforcement of the competition policy at the national level is the key in this process, but this should be coordinated with the regional and international objectives and regulations in this field. Romania is facing a double challenge: on the one side, it had to set up a competition policy, which was almost ignored before the’90s, on the other side, it had to comply, recently, with high standards in the field, as an EU candidate. Now, as a member state, the promotion of a competition culture becomes a must, along with the design of an adequate system of information and knowledge dissemination for all of those involved. The paper is based on a original and qualitative research and aims at emphasising the increased necessity of the promotion of a competition culture for the competitiveness of the Romanian business environment on the European level in the new context of accession. This will help Romanian business to face the competition challenges within a more extended single European market, as an essential issue of the free market economy status recently granted, and accordingly to the most important EU objectives set up at Lisabon to become the most competitive economy in the world up to 2010.