Bertin Martens
Bertin Martens is a Visiting fellow at Bruegel. He has been working on digital economy issues, including e-commerce, geo-blocking, digital copyright and media, online platforms and data markets and regulation, as senior economist at the Joint Research Centre (Seville) of the European Commission, for more than a decade until April 2022. Prior to that, he was deputy chief economist for trade policy at the European Commission, and held various other assignments in the international economic policy domain. He is currently a non-resident research fellow at the Tilburg Law & Economics Centre (TILEC) at Tilburg University (Netherlands).
His current research interests focus on economic and regulatory issues in digital data markets and online platforms, the impact of digital technology on institutions in society and, more broadly, the long-term evolution of knowledge accumulation and transmission systems in human societies. Institutions are tools to organise information flows. When digital technologies change information costs and distribution channels, institutional and organisational borderlines will shift.
He holds a PhD in economics from the Free University of Brussels.
Featured work
How does the EU Data Act aim to promote competition in data markets?
Has the Digital Markets Act got it wrong on app stores?
The app-store obligations in the European Union’s Digital Markets Act are unlikely to weaken the market power of Apple and Google.
Pro- and anti-competitive provisions in the proposed European Union Data Act
This paper explores several pro- and anti-competitive provisions included the proposed EU Data Act.
How to fix the European Union’s proposed Data Act
The proposed EU Data Act on industrial and non-personal data should be simpler and clearer, or the benefits could be limited.