A Financial Centre For Two Empires

An historical, empirical, doctrinal and comparative case study of how a former British colony became China's international financial centre.

On the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, this book presents the first monographic study of the Hong Kong Basic Law as an economic document. The Basic Law codifies what Gonzalo Villalta Puig and Eric C Ip call free market constitutionalism, the logic of Hong Kong’s economic liberty as the freest market economy in the world. This book, which is the outcome of several years of study with the financial support of the General Research Fund of Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council, evaluates the public choice rationale of the Basic Law and its projection on the Hong Kong economy, with a focus on the policy development of economic liberty both internally and externally. In the academic tradition of James M Buchanan’s constitutional political economy, the book opens with a conceptualisation of free market constitutionalism in Hong Kong. It studies the origins of this concept in the 19th-century classically liberal common law and how it developed into a Hayekian laissez-faire convention under British colonial rule, was codified into the Basic Law and is interpreted and applied by the branches of the Government of the Region. The book closes with remarks on the future of Hong Kong’s free market constitutionalism in face of recent challenges as the year 2047 approaches and the 50 years of ‘unchanged’ capitalist system under the Basic Law pass. This book will appeal to students, scholars and practitioners of law, economics, political science and public administration. It will especially appeal to those with an interest in Hong Kong law, international economic law or comparative constitutional law.

Provides a comparative overview of corporate governance frameworks and practices in major Asian countries.

In recent decades, the culture, society, politics, and economics of Bahrain have been transformed, driving its global ambitions while retaining to a degree the rule of law and cosmopolitanism. Islam and Capitalism in the Making of Modern Bahrain examines the transformation of Bahrain from the 1930s, from a regional trading port and then an important oil producer into the financial hub for the Gulf and into a global centre of Islamic finance. It focuses on the changes and tensions that transformation brought to Bahrain's political, legal, economic, religious, and social structures. In this book, Rajeswary Brown explores the rising force of youth populism driven by the persistence of poverty and unemployment, notably among rural Shi'ite communities and unemployed middle-class youth, as well as examining Bahrain's skillful reconciliation of the demands of Islamic faith, expressed in the Sharia, to the requirements of modern financial capitalism. In this, Bahrain's experience can be set against the modern history of much of the rest of the Middle East, most strikingly with respect to the position of Islamic charities, notably in Syria, comparisons of which are fully explored here.

This is a compelling analysis of the corporate economies of China and India, which are having a huge impact not just on the international economy, but also in the geopolitical and international strategy sphere as a result of an accelerated globalisation by these two countries, which is unleashing powerful economic challenges to corporate structures, economic institutions and law worldwide. The big question is how after centuries of underdevelopment China and now India are emerging powerfully and pulling ahead of Western European economies. Analysing the role of the state and the adroit use of law, and their impact on the corporate evolution of both China and India, provides greater clarity and insight into why China has evolved as a manufacturing nation utilizing cheap abundant labour while India has not exploited such advantages but instead focused on IT and higher value industries, even abroad as Tata has demonstrated in the motor industry in Europe. Again while Chinese corporations have expanded abroad as an arm of the state into Asia, Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America and parts of the southern states of the USA, India has pushed principally into Europe through the efforts of powerful minority capitalists of Parsi and Gujerati background, overcoming technological gaps and differences through acquisitions and absorptions of existing corporations in particular industries, especially in steel, automobiles and textiles. In China, state owned corporations have been dominant. In India, though state owned enterprises have been powerful since 1951, it has been private capitalists with an established stronghold since the colonial period and even under the Socialist period from 1951-1991 who have been the more productive main actors both in India and abroad.

Small jurisdictions have become significant players in cross-border corporate and financial services. Their nature, legal status, and market roles, however, remain under-theorized. Lacking a sufficiently nuanced framework to describe their functions in cross-border finance - and the peculiar strengths of those achieving global dominance in the marketplace - it remains impossible to evaluate their impacts in a comprehensive manner. This book advances a new conceptual framework to refine the analysis and direct it toward more productive inquiries. Bruner canvasses extant theoretical frameworks used to describe and evaluate the roles of small jurisdictions in cross-border finance. He then proposes a new concept that better captures the characteristics, competitive strategies, and market roles of those achieving global dominance in the marketplace - the market-dominant small jurisdiction (MDSJ). Bruner identifies the central features giving rise to such jurisdictions' competitive strengths - some reflect historical, cultural, and geographic circumstances, while others reflect development strategies pursued in light of those circumstances. Through this lens, he evaluates a range of small jurisdictions that have achieved global dominance in specialized areas of cross-border finance, including Bermuda, Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Delaware. Bruner further tests the MDSJ concept's explanatory power through a broader comparative analysis, and he concludes that the MDSJs' significance will likely continue to grow - as will the need for a more effective means of theorizing their roles in cross-border finance and the global dynamics generated by their ascendance.

This volume offers a comparative study of Hong Kong, Singapore and Mainland China's financial models conducted by leading experts in the field and advances a sophisticated and common understanding on the development of financial centres in Asia based on the rule of law.

Shareholder inspection rights form an important tool for shareholder protection. They offer shareholders seeking information private access to specific books and records of the company that are otherwise not publicly available. While there has been a discourse on the topic in some jurisdictions such as Delaware (USA), it has not received scholarly treatment at an international level. This Research Handbook seeks to alter that, and signifies the first endeavor to engage in a comprehensive and comparative analysis of shareholder inspection.