Smyrnova K. EU Legal Order of Competition in the European Union (newest trends of development).

The work focuses on systematic evolutionary stages of the origin and development of the concept of free competition that is subjected to changes depending on socio-economic factors in different states. In the narrow sense competition is a form of legal conduct in a market (in legal framework). It should be emphasized that these frameworks are established by national legislation and international law. It seems logical to define competition in a wide sense as an interdisciplinary notion that covers economic, social and legal principles. The narrow concept of competition is more formalized, and therefore becomes the object of this study. It was discovered that a lot of the ideas of competition in a liberal market are borrowed from the works of ordoliberalists who recognize this form of market economy in which the competition framework is created by the state in order to achieve the highest possible intensity of competition and, at the same time, to limit factors that distort competitive conditions. Ordoliberalists believe that the regulation of monopolies and competition automatically facilitates social justice. It is proved that EU competition policy is not an isolated domain, and thus the doctoral thesis is heavily laced with cross-national or international comparisons. In this context, the comparative analysis of American and European systems of competition regulation is carried out with the aim to describe their main features and differences of cartel rules, merger control provisions and abuse regulations. The manuscript mounts a clear idea about the role of the EU Treaty, as interpreted by the Court of Justice, as the EU's economic constitution which draws on well-established literatures in ordoliberal economics and political liberalism, and then elaborates an argument based on case studies viewed through the potentially contradictory lenses of two very different forms of EU policy-making: competition policy with its highly jurisdified systems of enforcement for protecting competitive markets and industrial policy, an archetypal 'soft area' of policy-making aimed at dealing with problems of market failure where the Member States have been notably reluctant to confer competence upon the EU institutions. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and especially its provisions on competition. It is proved that Ukrainian competition law does indeed need a reform which should, inter alia, focus on the implementation of the transparency principle and further enforcement of harmonized EU competition rules especially in the sphere of calculating fines, merger regulation, transfer technology regulation and state aid enforcement.