Recent developments in Competition policy and regional aid: adjusting to the ‘new normal’

State aid control is completing its move to a new phase of development. In 2014 the Commission largely finished its reform programme, the State aid modernisation (SAM) initiative. This placed new emphasis on transparency, effectiveness and evaluation, recast the basis for the assessment and compliance of State aid across a range of policy areas and further increased the ‘self-policing’ element of State aid discipline. The main element of the reform package not (yet) achieved is the adoption of a Communication on the ‘notion’ of State aid.