European Market Integration through Technology-driven M&As

Merger and Acquisitions (M&As) have been an important tool for
reorganizing the European market since the establishment of European
Economic and Monetary Union. This article suggests that European
integration helped and encouraged European firms to source technology
across national borders in Europe, establishing European innovative firms.
The figures confirm that, once barriers impeding the free movement of
capital, goods and labour had fallen, European firms used M&As
intensively to enter foreign European markets. Enhancing technology
competencies is found to be one of the main motives for cross-border
acquisitions in the 1990s but is not a factor in domestic acquisitions over
the same period.