Xavier Boutin

Xavier Boutin is a founding partner at Positive Competition. He has 15 years of experience in economic and econometric modeling for the analysis of competition cases, business strategies and the evaluation of public policies (including State Aid). He is featured in the Who’s Who Legal of Competition Economists, a ranking listing the world’s leading competition professionals. Xavier is also a founding and board member of l’Entente, the association of French speaking practitioners in Brussels. Xavier leads a team of consultants advising clients in the context of merger, State Aid and antitrust proceedings in front of the European Commission and national competition authorities. His most recent experiences involve vertical and horizontal mergers, exclusionary and exploitative abuses, information exchanges, cartel overcharge analysis and sectors such as high technology (including pharmaceutical and IT), internet platforms, online and offline retail, media, publishing industry, basic and manufacturing industries, FMCG, agriculture and finance. Xavier has also testified as an expert in commercial litigation. Prior to founding Positive Competition, Xavier was an expert with Compass Lexecon. Xavier also spent almost eight years in the Chief Economist Team of the European Commission’s DG Competition. He was involved in a wide variety of high level antitrust, merger and state aid cases (including in front of the ECJ), as well as policy issues. He had a major contribution to the 102 guidance paper, the 101 horizontal guidelines (agreements between competitors) and Block Exemption Regulation (BER), as well as on various policy initiatives in the food chain and competitiveness of the European Industry. He also contributed to the State Aid Modernization, in particular, in the areas of R&D&I and Regional Aid. Last, he was an influential proponent of the obligation to evaluate State aid schemes and the lead author of the corresponding guidance documents. Before joining the European Commission, Xavier worked as a research fellow at INSEE in France. A graduate from the Ecole Polytechnique, he also holds a degree from ENSAE and a PhD in Economics from EHESS (Paris School of Economics). He is still active in research and teaching. His research has, for instance, appeared in the Journal of Financial Economics and in the Economic Journal. After teaching in Centrale, Supelec and ENSAE, he currently Adjunct Professor of Economics and Research Fellow at ULB.