Volume 71, Issue 1

Almost 9 out of 10 Germans are covered by the pay-as-you-go solidarity-based health insurance. However, including the remaining population would hardly expend the solidarity redistribution in the cross-section. It is true that in the pay-as-you-go system a solidary balance between young and old can be achieved at any time. But in an ageing population, this can only succeed in the long term at the expense of the young. To preserve intergenerational solidarity, expenditure financed by contribution must be limited. A funded second pillar should be set up to provide for future increase in expenditure above and beyond this.

After the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council presented their positions on the Digital Markets Act (DMA) last year, negotiations between the three institutions in the so-called triologue negotiations have been ongoing since the beginning of this year. There is probably agreement on the goal: The DMA should break up entrenched market positions of gatekeeper platforms and protect competition in the digital markets for the benefit of consumers. However, there still seems to be a need for discussion in detail, e. g., as regards the definition of addressees and the scope of conduct obligations (esp. the self-preferencing prohibition). The Monopolies Commission recently made some suggestions in this regard in a Special Report.

The negotiations for the Digital Markets Act have just been concluded. Together with international competition economists, I have spent the last few months writing a series of policy papers on the need to regulate the platform economy and commenting on the DMA draft. My conclusion: the DMA is an important step in the right direction. It has been sharpened in the final trilogue negotiation, in which the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers negotiated the amendments proposed by the European Parliament. The implementation that now lies ahead is a major challenge that will be almost impossible to meet without a significant increase in the Commission’s resources. On some points, particularly in the area of merger control and the use of structural measures, the rules in the DMA as adopted do not yet go far enough. In this respect, the Digital Markets Act can and should only be the beginning on the way to comprehensive and effective protection of competition on platform markets.

The author, who is responsible for competition policy in the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, analyses the objectives, the regulatory approach, the substantive obligations and the strengths and potential shortcomings of the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The contribution attempts to answer the question to which extent the DMA will deliver on its twin promise to increase contestability and fairness on digital markets.

We show that actual Eurosystem’s monetary policy of purchasing government bonds of the countries of the Eurozone corresponds to the concept of Modern Monetary Theory. Here the state creates and skims off the required money supply for its expenditures himself. The economic policy challenges emerging from the expanded monetary basis in the Eurozone as consequence of the government bond purchases are substantial. We stress that European monetary policy should therefore immediately address the task of reducing the monetary basis and at the same time limiting possible adjustment costs for the European economies. This should take place within an institutionalized monetary management framework.

Zusammenfassung Die EZB hat bereits zum 1. Januar 1999 ihre Arbeit aufgenommen. Sie ist daher ihren Kinderschuhen längst entwachsen. In diesem Aufsatz diskutieren wir das neue, symmetrische „2 %-Inflationsziel“, das Ausmaß an früheren Zielverletzungen, aber auch das zweite, nie wirklich explizit formulierte Ziel der EZB, das den Zusammenhalt der Eurozone zum Gegenstand hat. Die Theorie optimaler Währungsräume hält mit Roland Vaubel’s Kriterium der Variabilität der Inflationsraten ein überzeugendes Instrument bereit, um den Grad des monetären Zusammenhalts in der Eurozone zu messen. Danach hat sich der Europäische Währungsraum zwischen 1999 und 2020 in manchen Teilperioden ziemlich, in anderen weniger gut dargestellt. Unsere eigenen empirischen Untersuchungen deuten allerdings nicht auf die Existenz kleinerer Ländergruppen innerhalb der Eurozone hin, die einen signifikant besseren Währungsraum als die heutige Eurozone abgeben würden. Die Kernziele der EZB, nämlich der Erhalt der Eurozone einerseits und die Sicherung von Preisniveaustabilität andererseits, stehen künftig nicht mehr länger (wie zwischen 2008 und 2020) komplementär zueinander, sondern befinden sich in Zeiten steigender Inflationsraten in einem direkten Zielkonflikt.