Mergers, acquisitions and the determinants of national competitiveness in the European electricity industry An empirical test

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are critical operations by which companies implement their growth strategies. Over the last 15 years various phenomena have dramatically increased the number of national and cross-border M&A in many industries. Scholars have extensively studied the European electricity industry. The evidence commonly presented in recent scholarship is that, after the continental industry deregulation started in 1996, electric companies from the more competitive European countries tended to perform more M&A. However, to date scholars have not analysed whether the different types of context (i.e. national) conditions of one home-base impact homogeneously or heterogeneously on the M&A activity of its own national companies. This article presents the findings of a statistical analysis aimed at measuring the relationships between each determinant of the competitiveness of 26 European countries and the set of M&A (at both domestic and cross-border levels) of European electricity companies over the period 2008-09).