The 2008 financial crisis brought increased scrutiny to the ways in which the directors of the world's major financial institutions handle their duties and how they impact investors, shareholders and consumers. In this comprehensive Handbook, leading scholars from around the world explore the nature of the relationship between a company and its directors, assessing issues such as how duties are discharged, what liabilities may arise and whose interests directors should consider before embarking on commercial ventures.The Handbook begins with chapters that explore the range of company law developments in several common law countries, with further chapters examining the law in several civil law jurisdictions. The Handbook then looks beyond company law to issues such as the role of directors in fostering corporate social responsibility and directors' duties to consumers. The final chapters consider directors' duties in times of financial turmoil. A comprehensive and ground-breaking book of original scholarly research, the Handbook will be a valuable contribution to the libraries of company law scholars and students, as well as to business people with a professional interest in the topic. Contributors: C. Amatucci, A. Anand, V. Brand, T.A. Gabaldon, M.M. Harner, J.G. Hill, S.H. Goo, M. Jaramillo, D. Klingler, A. Lista, J. MacIntosh, A. Paolini, P. Pais de Vanconcelos, S. Watson

The Research Handbook on Central Banking focuses on global central banks as institutions and not abstractions, providing historical and practical detail about how central banks work and the challenges they face. This Research Handbook offers the most interdisciplinary treatment of global central banks published to date by addressing key questions regarding where they come from, how they have changed, and the challenges they face during uncertain times. Divided into two parts, the Research Handbook firstly takes readers on a global tour, covering central banks in the US, Latin America, Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, China, Africa, and more. In the second part, authors delve into themes of broad application, including transparency, independence, unconventional monetary policy, payment systems, and crisis response. The interdisciplinary mix of contributors include some of the most prominent names in central banking as well as a new generation of scholars who are shaping the conversation about central banks and their role in global politics, economics, and society at large. Interdisciplinary and innovative, this Research Handbook will prove essential reading for scholars focusing on central banks, financial regulation, global governance, and related areas, as well as for central bankers and employees at central banks. Contributors include: C. Adam, K. Alexander, A. Berg, R. Bhala, D. Bholat, C. Borio, F. Capie, P. Conti-Brown, R. Darbyshire, F. Decker, B. Geva, C. Goodhart, A.G. Haldane, L.I. Jacome, H. James, J. Johnson, R.B. Kahn, H. Kanda, C. Kaufmann, R.M. Lastra, X. Liu, S. McCracken, E.E. Meade, S.T. Omarova, R. Portillo, M. Raskin, A.L. Riso, R. Smits, P. Tucker, F. Unsal, R.H. Weber, G. Wood, T. Yamanaka, D. Yermack, A. Zabai, Z. Zhou, C. Zilioli

The history of rivers crossing the borders of rival countries, such as East and West Germany, China and Russia, the United States and its neighbors, has much to teach about international watercourse management. In the first book written in English about international watercourses on the Korean Peninsula, Yeonghwan Chang uses a study of foreign cases to propose a wide range of specific strategies and projects for efficient use of shared rivers on the Korean Peninsula. These strategies may also provide useful guidance for future cooperative projects between South Korea and North Korea.

While vulnerability is a concept often mentioned in labour law and employment policy discourse, its precise meaning can remain elusive. This book provides rigorous theoretical analysis and contains fresh insights to aid our understanding of vulnerability. It is a stimulating contribution to the debate on how legal regulation responds to the changing characteristics of today's labour market.' - Mark Bell, The University of Dublin, Ireland The shifting nature of employment practice towards the use of more precarious work forms has caused a crisis in classical labour law and engendered a new wave of regulation. This timely book deftly uses this crisis as an opportunity to explore the notion of precariousness or vulnerability in employment relationships. Arguing that the idea of vulnerability has been under-theorised in the labour law literature, Lisa Rodgers illustrates how this extends to the design of regulation for precarious work. The book's logical structure situates vulnerability in its developmental context before moving on to examine the goals of the regulation of labour law for vulnerability, its current status in the law and case studies of vulnerability such as temporary agency work and domestic work. These threads are astutely drawn together to show the need for a shift in focus towards workers as 'vulnerable subjects' in all their complexity in order to better inform labour law policy and practice more generally. Constructively critical, Labour Law, Vulnerability and the Regulation of Precarious Work will prove invaluable to students and scholars of labour and employment law at local, EU and international levels. With its challenge to orthodox thinking and proposals for the improvement of the regulation of labour law, labour law institutions will also find this book of great interest and value.

The achievement of financial stability is one of the most pressing issues today. This timely and innovative book provides an analytical framework to assess financial (in)stability as an equilibrium phenomenon compatible with the orderly functioning of a modern market economy. The authors expertly show how good regulatory policy can be implemented and that its effects on the real as well as the nominal side of the economy can be properly analyzed. The core of their approach is to take realistic account of the interaction between endogenous default, agent heterogeneity and money and liquidity, and suggest how a quantifiable metric of financial fragility could be developed. This insightful book will serve as a basis for future work on financial stability management for both academics and policy makers and provide guidance on how to undertake crisis prevention and resolution.

Using a multi-disciplinary and comparative approach, this study examines emerging and innovative attempts to tackle privacy and legal issues in cloud computing such as personal data privacy, security and intellectual property protection. An international team of legal scholars, computer science researchers, regulators and practitioners present original and critical responses to the growing challenges posed by cloud computing. They analyze the specific legal implications pertaining to jurisdiction, biomedical practice and information ownership, as well as issues of regulatory control, competition and cross-border regulation. Law academics, practitioners and regulators will find this book to be a valuable, practical and accessible resource, as will computer science scholars interested in cloud computing issues. Contributors: H. Chang, A.S.Y. Cheung, A. Chiu, K.P. Chow, E.S. Dove, X. Fan, Y. Joly, T.S.-H. Kaan, B.M. Knoppers, J. Kong, G. Master, J.-P. Moiny, C. Reed, D.N. Staiger, G.Y. Tian, R.H. Weber, P.K. Yu

This book provides an essential guide for the successful operation of a contract let under the NEC3 Engineering and Construction Contract. It includes a brief history of the development of the NEC3 family of contracts with a focus on the Engineering and Construction Contract, detailed advice on contract strategy and an outline of the main clauses and procedures of the ECC. It discusses the experience of users from all parts of the industry and, most importantly, focuses on the implementation of good practice - taking readers through what is necessary for the effective and efficient operation of the ECC. Updated to cover NEC3, this is a helpful problem-solving guide providing structured hints and tips in a conversational style.

The exploitation of natural resources in Africa represents a major challenge. The African continent, which remains largely unexplored, contains a large part of the world's natural resources. The current context, characterised by a fluctuation of commodity prices, does not reduce the growing interest in Africa and its extractive sector. Oil, Gas and Mining Law in Africa analyses the mining and petroleum laws in African countries and includes an assessment of contractual aspects applicable to oil, gas and mining operations. The innovative interest of this book is to provide a detailed and up-to-date analysis of mining and petroleum laws applicable to the upstream sector in Africa. It focuses on all the mining and petroleum laws and especially those recently enacted in a constantly changing environment.

This up-to-date book takes a fresh look at regulation and risk and argues that the allure of regulation lies in its capacity to reduce risk while preserving the benefits of trade, travel and commerce. Regulation appears as a politically attractive, targeted and effective way to ensure that disasters of the past are not repeated. Diverse challenges are tackled through regulatory means - including the industrial, financial and terrorist-related hazards analyzed in this book. Fiona Haines' empirical work shows, however, that regulation attempts to reduce risks beyond their stated remit of preventing future disaster. Her analysis reveals a complex nexus between risk and regulation where fulfilment of regulatory potential depends on managing three fundamentally different types of risk: actuarial, socio-cultural and political. This complex risk management task affects both reform and compliance efforts, generating tension and paradoxical outcomes. Nonetheless, Haines argues, enhancing political legitimacy and public reassurance are central, not peripheral, to successful regulation. This insightful book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate researchers working in regulation across law, politics, sociology, criminology and public management. Masters of public management, MBA students, public administrators and regulators, as well as political commentators, will also find this book invaluable.

This book is a fully up-to-date, comprehensive guide to the law, economics and practice of UK merger control law. This guide presents an integrated legal and economic assessment of the substantive appraisal of mergers and examines in detail the following topics: the history of the Enterprise Act and its development from the Fair Trading Act; the various regulatory bodies that form the institutional structure of the UK merger control regime; enterprises subject to merger control regulation and the jurisdictional thresholds of the Enterprise Act; the relationship of the Enterprise Act with the European Merger Regulation; public interest mergers and the role of the Secretary of State; and merger remedies. All recent legislative developments including the merger of the OFT and the Competition Commission and the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, as well as all relevant case since the first edition of the magisterial text are explored.

Smart procurement aims to leverage public buying power in pursuit of social, environmental and innovation goals. Socially-orientated smart procurement has been a controversial issue under EU law. The extent to which the Court of Justice (ECJ) has supported or rather constrained its development has been intensely debated by academics and practitioners alike. After the slow development of a seemingly permissive approach, the ECJ case law reached an apparent turning point a decade ago in the often criticised judgments in Ruffert and Laval, which left a number of open questions. The more recent judgments in Bundesdruckerei and RegioPost have furthered the ECJ case law on socially orientated smart procurement and aimed to clarify the limits within which Member States can use it to enforce labour standards. This case law opens up additional possibilities, but it also creates legal uncertainty concerning the interaction of the EU rules on the posting of workers, public procurement and fundamental internal market freedoms. These developments have been magnified by the reform of the EU public procurement rules in 2014. This book assesses the limits that the revised EU rules and the more recent ECJ case law impose on socially-orientated smart procurement and, more generally, critically reflects on potential future developments in this area of intersection of several strands of EU economic law.

Agricultural Law in Sub-Saharan Africa: Cases and Comments introduces the subject of agricultural law and economics to researchers, practitioners, and students in common law countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, and presents information from the legal system in Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The law and economics approach entails the use of quantitative methods in research. This is consistent with the expectations in an applied economics field such as agricultural economics. Covering the general traditional law topics in contracts, torts, and property, the book goes further to introduce cutting-edge and region-relevant topics, including contracts with illiterate parties, contract farming, climate change, and transboundary water issues. The book is supported by an extensive list of reference materials, as well as study and enrichment exercises, to deepen readers' understanding of the principles discussed in the book. It is a learning tool, first and foremost, and can be used as a stand-alone resource to teach the subject matter of agricultural law and economics to professionals new to the subject area as well as to students in law school, agricultural economics, economics, and inter-disciplinary classes.