Transport Policy 14 (2007) 1–10 The liner shipping industry and EU competition rules Marco Benacchio a , Claudio Ferrari b,Ã , Enrico Musso b a Autorita` Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, Rome, Italy b University of Genova, Via Vivaldi 2, Genova, Italy Available online 4 August 2006 Abstract The literature has always looked at co-operation in the shipping industry with some benevolence. While co-operation benefits the transport industry as it reduces operators, guarantees higher profits and regulates supply, does it also increase the consumers’ surplus, or does it cause lower benefits and eventually inefficiency? In fact, liner shipping is the sole industry that is heavily exempted from antitrust regulations, both in Europe and North America. The paper, moving from the recent decision of the EU regarding the maritime liner sector, and from the EU Commission’s Consultation Paper on the review of Regulation 4056/86, aims at investigating in what ways antitrust rules can ‘‘monitor and control’’ the market in a proper way according to the emerging trends of integration in the maritime logistics sector. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Liner shipping; Conferences; Anti-trust regulation; European commission 1. Introduction Since the advent of conference agreements, liners have experienced considerable variety of forms of co-operation, ranging from conferences to consortia, from slot charters to strategic alliances. Intra-firm co-operation ranks among the major organi- zational innovations to have taken place in the liner shipping industry (LSI) over the last decades. The economic literature has studied in depth the causes for this phenomenon in the LSI, both in terms of horizontal and vertical forms of co-operation. The former involving firms producing the maritime transport services, the latter in the form of cooperation between shipping liners and terminal operators and/or land transport operators (the so-called Multimodal Transport Operators, or MTO). The first form of co-operation is the Conference agreement, aimed at providing a regular and reliable liner service in a stable trading environment where service and rate levels are not subject to wild swings. In over 100 years of liner services, Conference agree- ments were the first form of co-operation to appear. The most modern form are strategic alliances, which group conference members (also those belonging to different conferences) and independent liners. According to Ryoo and Thanopoulou (1999), strategic alliances give the opportunity to:  widen operative borders of a single firm;  achieve the scale suitable to compete in global markets;  quickly enter new markets so maximizing the return (output) of each partner’s resources (input). The literature has analysed in detail this topic both through theoretical and practical studies, highlighting the effects of different forms of co-operation on the single firm, the maritime transport industry as a whole, the logistics industry, and on the supply chain. The results, in a broad sense, were that co-operation may be necessary to pursue competition inside the market. Song (2002) in his study on the ports of Hong Kong and those of South China, used the new term of ‘‘co-opetition’’ which may well be applied also to the carriers’ behaviour in respect of each other. Academics have seldom investigated the effects of co- operation on consumers and whether the economic benefits ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/tranpol 0967-070X/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tranpol.2006.05.010 Ã Corresponding author. Tel.: +39102095235. E-mail address: ferrari@economia.unige.it (C. Ferrari).