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Bertin Martens

Senior fellow

Bertin Martens is a Senior 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.

Disclosure of external interests  

Declaration of interests 2023

Featured work

External publication

'In Situ' Data Rights

Privacy empowers individuals to control what is gathered and who sees it; portability permits analysis and creates competition. By moving our data to

Georgios Petropoulos, Bertin Martens, Marshall Van Alstyne and Geoffrey Parker