Establishment of Effective Mechanisms for Private Enforcement of Competition Law in the Republic of North Macedonia – An Inevitable Step for the Near Future, or an Elusve Fiction?

Abstract

Competition law plays a crucial role in the efficient functioning of the free market economy. It aims to deter potential infringers, detect anticompetitive behavior, sanction those behaviors, and finally, compensate the affected parties of these behaviors. Historically, competition law has been used predominately as a deterrent mechanism, and only if violations are detected, as a mechanism to sanction the wrongdoers. Compensation of victims has played a secondary role. However, in the past decade, there were many scandals such as Dieselgate, Cambridge Analytica, and Ryanair's mass cancellation of flights, which resulted in mass harm suffered by consumers. This, coupled with the lack of capacity of many national competition agencies to discover and tackle anticompetitive actions of many large companies solely on their own, imposed the idea for the strengthening of the private enforcement of competition law. The paper aims to analyze the latest trends in the sphere of private enforcement of competition law on a global scale, primarily through an examination of the competition laws of the USA and the EU, before focusing on the current situation in the Republic of North Macedonia.