Definition of Aid

Abstract

This chapter provides a discussion on the definition of State aid. The rules in the European Community treaties governing State aids trace their origin to those of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, where the material word is ‘subsidy’. The draftsmen demonstrably employ broad language in stipulating, as a condition of its capture by Article 87(2), that aid must be ‘granted by a Member State or through state resources in any form whatsoever’. The Court of Justice has repeatedly stated that one of the important and defining characteristics of a State aid is the ‘condition of specificity’: in order to amount to aid, the measure must confer assistance or advantage to specific undertakings. A propensity to influence trade between Member States is the standard by reference to which the compatibility of aid with the common market is to be evaluated. In general, recent litigation has drawn attention to a several important difficulties in the definition of State aid.

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 — 49 citations exist upstream.