Services of General Economic Interest and Universal Service in EU Law

Abstract

Services of general economic interest (SGEI) are an EU legal category that provides an exception to the competition rules for the proportionate pursuit of legitimate public interest goals by private undertakings.While remaining the subject of intense debate at EU level, SGEI have played an important role in liberalising the network industries and are likely to play a similar role elsewhere in future.This paper covers recent developments concerning SGEI, discusses universal service obligations as the key content of SGEI and proposes a structured test for applying SGEI in a proportional manner, based on the concept of market failure.* Dutch Healthcare Authority and Tilburg Centre of Law and Economics (TILEC). 1 Directive 2006/123 on services in the internal market [2006] OJ L376/36 3 Thus Christian Poucet v Assurances Générales de France and Caisse Mutuelle Régionale du Languedoc-Roussillon (Poucet) (C-159/91 & C-160/91) [1993] E.C.R. I-637; Sodemare SA v Regione Lombardia (Sodemare) (C-70/95) [1997] E.C.R. I-3395; and Federación Española de Empresa de Tecnolog ía Sanitaria v Commission (FENIN) (C-205/03) [2006] E.C.R. I-6295, where the solidarity element prevailed.The opposite occurred in, e.g., Fédération Française des Sociétés d'Assurance v Ministère d'Agriculture et de la Pêche (FFSA) (C-244/94) [1995] E.C.R. I-4013 and Albany International BV v Stichting Bedrijfspensioenfonds Textielindustrie (Albany) (C-67/96) [1999] E.C.R.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.