Insolvency Law In East Asia

Insolvency law reform has become a subject of public urgency in many countries in the past two decades and particularly in much of Asia over the last ten years. This volume provides an overview of insolvency laws and related rules and procedures in the countries of East Asia. The book comprises two introductory chapters dealing with issues such as legal culture and cross-border insolvency, before examining the fourteen principal jurisdictions in the region. Each chapter addresses the key themes of different insolvency regimes, such as: the legal system and culture; personal insolvency laws; corporate insolvency rules; court-based schemes of arrangement; winding-up procedures; liquidators; enforcement; and offences. This title will be an invaluable guide to academics, practitioners and policy makers working in the areas of comparative and commercial law.

First published in 1999, this volume provides an overview of company laws in South East Asia, North East Asia and the Pacific. The chapters adopt a standard format to allow for comparisons to be made as well as highlighting key features of company laws in each jurisdiction. The contributors are experts in their fields and present practical and policy related insights. The book also contains some useful overviews of company law themes in Asia.

The shift of economic gravity towards East Asia requires a critical examination of law's role in the Asian Century. This volume explores the diverse scholarly perspectives on law's role in the economic rise of East Asia and moves from general debates, such as whether law enjoys primacy over culture, state intervention or free markets in East Asian capitalism, to specific case studies looking at the nature of law in East Asian negotiations, contracts, trade policy and corporate governance. The collection of articles exposes the clefts and cleavages in the scholarly literature explaining law's form, function and future in the Asian Century.

The massive and complex process of change in East Asia over recent decades has brought about a transformation in the nature of law and legal institutions in the region. Whilst the process of change has to some degree mimicked western models of law and legal change, there have been significant differences in approach due to the different social foundations of East Asian societies. The more obvious of these has been the variety of ways in which rule of law ideas have been adopted in many East Asian countries where the role of the state is more dominant when compared with Western models. This volume brings together a selection of the most important writings on East Asia of researchers in recent years, and shows the broad range of questions which researchers have been addressing about the effect of law reform and legal change in societies dominated by traditional values and political forces, and at a time of massive economic change.

Abstract: June 1999 - Evidence from East Asia suggests that a firm's ownership relationship with a family or bank provides insurance against the likelihood of bankruptcy during bad times, possibly at the expense of minority shareholders. Bankruptcy is more likely in countries with strong creditor rights and a good judicial system - perhaps because creditors are more likely to force a firm to file for bankruptcy. The widespread financial crisis in East Asia caused large economic shocks, which varied by degree across the region. That crisis provides a unique opportunity for investigating the factors that determine the use of bankruptcy processes in a number of economies. Claessens, Djankov, and Klapper study the use of bankruptcy in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan (China), and Thailand. These economies differ in their institutional frameworks for resolving financial distress, partly because of the different origins of their judicial systems. One difference is the strength of creditor rights, which Claessens, Djankov, and Klapper document. They expect that differences in legal enforcement and judicial efficiency should affect the resolution of financial distress. Using a sample of 4,569 publicly traded East Asian firms, they observe a total of 106 bankruptcies in 1997 and 1998. They find that: · The likelihood of filing for bankruptcy is lower for firms with ownership links to banks and families, controlling for firm and country characteristics. Filings are more likely in countries with better judicial systems; Filings are more likely where there are both strong creditor rights and a good judicial system. These results alone do not allow Claessens, Djankov, and Klapper to address whether increased use of bankruptcy is an efficient resolution mechanism. This paper - a product of the Financial Economics Unit, Financial Sector Practice Department - is part of a larger effort in the department to study corporate financing and governance mechanisms in emerging markets.

Different levels of corporate leverage are used in this paper to help explain the wide range of post-crisis output adjustment across East Asia. In the model developed here, highly leveraged firms facing a cutoff of capital inflows are threatened by bankruptcy. These firms respond by eliminating investment and selling their capital goods-at a discount-to try to stay afloat. Lower investment and wasteful capital sales shrink the aggregate capital stock, trigger deflationary pressures, and contract overall output. The available data are broadly consistent with the assumptions and predictions of the model.

This book examines the outcomes of the economic law reforms in Asian developing countries, guided by the leading international development financiers such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Included is a particular focus on the recent “insolvency law” reforms in the Asian emerging economies, such as Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. Such legal reforms are the results of the “transplant” of the model law provided by these donor agencies, a law that was created in the post-Asian Currency Crisis in the 1990s. This book therefore examines the outcomes of three decades of donor-guided legal reforms. Appropriately, it applies not only the static approach to the legal texts but also an empirical methodology through interview surveys of the corporate and financial sectors. Following the introduction in Chapter I, Chapter II reviews the basic theories and presents the methodological framework. Chapter III then analyzes the contents of insolvency law reforms in the major target countries, namely, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. Chapter IV provides a closer investigation into the design choices of Myanmar’s 2020 Insolvency Law as a typical example of the law reform involving the inter-donor conflict of law models between the Asian Development Bank and Japan’s official development assistance project. Lastly, Chapter V applies an empirical approach to the functioning of insolvency law, through international collaboration for interview surveys with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and their financiers.

A challenging and provocative book that contests the liberal assumption that the rule of law will go hand in hand with a transition to market-based economies and even democracy in East Asia. Using case studies from Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam, the authors argue that the rule of law is in fact more likely to provide political elites with the means closely to control civil society. It is essential, therefore, to locate conceptions of judicial independence and the rule of law more generally within the ideological vocabulary of the state.