Farm support is contentious in international negotiations. This in-depth assessment of the legal compliance and economic evaluation issues raised by the WTO Agreement on Agriculture presents consistent support data and forward-looking projections for eight developed and developing countries (EU, US, Japan, Norway, Brazil, China, India, Philippines), using original estimates where official notifications are not available. Variations over time in notified support in some cases reflect real policy changes; others merely reflect shifts in how countries represent their measures. The stalled Doha negotiations presage significantly tighter constraints for developed countries that provide the highest support, but loopholes will persist. Developing countries face fewer constraints and their trade-distorting farm support can rise. Pressure points and key remaining issues if a Doha agreement is reached are evaluated. Vigilant monitoring for compliance of farm support with WTO commitments will be required to lessen its negative consequences whether or not the Doha Round is concluded.

This book expands on law-related research by examining the legal aspects of sustainability with a focus on the impact on business strategies. It recognizes that firms must adopt an integrated approach to law and sustainability, considering multiple disciplines and goals, and serve as a forum for bringing together scholarship from fields such as environmental law, energy, government regulation and intellectual property. Firms increasingly have an interest in transitioning to sustainable business practices that take into consideration the fact that global resources are finite and will be increasingly scarce. They acknowledge that current actions have social, economic and environmental consequences and employ options to ensure that future generations have the same options and benefits. Examples of sustainable practices increasingly employed by firms include the institutionalization of “whole life-cycle� analysis in marketing and product design, utilization of sustainable inputs and energy sources, tracking and reporting sustainability performance, attempting the valuation of future generation prosperity and happiness as a discounting mechanism, and integrating sustainability into firm culture and management goals. It is clear that law and regulation have an extremely important role to play in the transition to more sustainable business practices. Broadly stated, law can provide structure for firms responding to forces that pull transition by enabling sustainability leadership and competitive advantage through funding models, intellectual property rights and collaboration means. Additionally, law can work to push transition by compelling firms to act through regulatory structures, accounting and governance mechanisms.

This book critically investigates the conditions of seafarers' rights in China in legislation and in practice, focusing in particular on the restructuring process following the 2006 Maritime Labour Convention. Accordingly, it poses key research questions to major Chinese stakeholders to gauge their responses to the Convention, to determine whether the protection of Chinese seafarers has actually improved since the advent of the Convention, and further, to identify the continuing challenges for future improvement. The Convention will enter into force in China in November 2016, bringing with it significant changes.

This anthology illustrates how law and economics is developing in Europe and what opportunities and problems – both in general and specific legal fields – are associated with this approach within the legal traditions of European countries. The first part illuminates the differences in the development and reception of the economic analysis of law in the American Common Law system and in the continental European Civil Law system. The second part focuses on the different ways of thinking of lawyers and economists, which clash in economic analysis of law. The third part is devoted to legal transplants, which often accompany the reception of law and economics from the United States. Finally, the fourth part focuses on the role economic analysis plays in the law of the European Union. This anthology with its 14 essays from young European legal scholars is an important milestone in establishing a European law and economics culture and tradition.

This book examines the role of The International Maritime Organization (IMO) in the prevention and control of pollution of the marine environment from vessels with a particular reference to the current north-south tensions regarding the strategy for combating climate change in the maritime sector as well as the prevention of marine pollution from the ship-breaking industry. The IMO, a United Nations specialized agency, has been entrusted with the duty to provide machinery for cooperation among governments for the prevention and control of pollution of the marine environment from vessels. The organization is responsible for drafting legal instruments as well as for facilitating technical cooperation for the protection of the marine environment. Although IMO legal instruments are mainly targeted at the prevention of pollution of the marine environment from vessels, there is a trend towards a liberal interpretation of this, and the organization has expanded its work to areas like shipbreaking, which is essentially a land-based industry.

This book is a major work that focuses exclusively on ship finance and includes contributions on the increasingly complex field of ship finance, which has over the last two decades become a key aspect in the world of shipping and ship owning. The book offers an enlightening mix of theoretical analysis and well-founded practical insights into the daily markets. Given that ship finance continues to develop dynamically around the world, the book covers subjects ranging from the German KG market to Islamic Finance, from loans to legal aspects and from asset pricing to risk management.

In short, the 24 selected and representative articles written in English by the author over the past 30-odd years, mainly published in international leading journals and now collected and compiled in this monograph, could be deemed the products of international academic debates. They record, reflect and embody the author’s personal views on a number of contemporary basic issues in international economic law & the international economic order. These personal views with Chinese characteristics are deeply rooted in China’s specific national situation and the common position of the world-wide weak groups, and are significantly and substantially different and independent from some existing voices from strong western powers, which is why the book bears the title “The Voice from China�. On the basis of their specific themes and content, the 24 representative articles are divided into six parts: 1) Jurisprudence of Contemporary International Economic Law; 2) Great Debates on Contemporary Economic Sovereignty; 3) China’s Strategic Position on Contemporary International Economic Order Issues; 4) Divergences on Contemporary Bilateral Investment Treaty; 5) Contemporary China’s Legislation on Sino-Foreign Economic Issues; and 6) Contemporary Chinese Practices on International Economic Disputes (Case Analysis).

Does the WTO leave appropriate policy space to its Members to pursue legitimate objectives, such as the economic development of developing countries, the conversion to a greener economy, or recovery in times of a global economic downturn? This legal and normative analysis of the WTO rules on subsidies and countervailing measures sheds light on why governments resort to subsidization and, by tracing the historical origins of the SCM Agreement and the Agreement on Agriculture, on why they have been willing to gradually confine their policy space. This sets the stage for a systematic and comprehensive legal analysis of both agreements, which integrates the vast amount of case law and proposals tabled in the Doha round. A separate case study explores the complex rules on export credit support, and the book closes with an in-depth normative assessment of these WTO rules on subsidies and countervailing measures.

This book examines the labour standards provisions in a number of Regional and Bilateral Trade Agreements, and assesses the potential of using the relevant clauses in these trade agreements as a benchmark for a multilateral approach. Based on the lessons learned from the Regional model, the book proposes a Global Labour and Trade Framework Agreement (GLTFA) combined with a joint ILO/WTO enforcement mechanism to resolve the contentious issue of the link between the CLS and international trade. The history of the linkage between the Core Labour Standards (CLS) and international trade dates back roughly 150 years, and has recently become one of the most vexing issues facing policy-makers. At the heart of the debate is the question whether or not trade sanctions should be imposed on countries that do not respect the CLS as embodied in multilateral conventions administered by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Concretely, this would entail inserting a social clause in the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, and would trigger the imposition of sanctions on those countries that do not adhere to the CLS.

Most of the world’s redundant ships are scrapped on the beaches of the Indian sub-continent, largely by hand. As well as cargo residues and wastes, ships contain high levels of hazardous materials that are released into the surrounding ecology when scrapped. The scrapping process is labour-intensive and largely manual; injuries and death are commonplace. Ship breaking was a relatively obscure industry until the late 1990s. In just 12 years, action by environmental NGOs has led to the ratification of an international treaty targeting the extensive harm to human and environmental health arising from this heavy, polluting industry; it has also produced important case law. Attempts to regulate the industry via the Basel Convention have resulted in a strong polarization of opinion as to its applicability and various international guidelines have also failed because of their voluntary nature. The adoption of the Hong Kong Convention in 2009 was a serious attempt to introduce international controls to this industry.

On 1 August 2008 the Chinese Anti-Monopoly Law entered into force, introducing a comprehensive framework for competition law to the Chinese market. One set of the new rules pertains to merger control. China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) was nominated as the authority responsible for enforcing merger control in China and has been actively doing so ever since. Recent years have established China as one of the most important merger filing jurisdictions for cross-border mergers alongside the EU and USA. This work evaluates the Chinese merger control law regime and MOFCOM's decision-making practice after more than five years of application. In particular, it assesses which policy goals (competition policy goals or industrial policy considerations) prevail in the written law and its application and provides suggestions for a further improvement of the law - with the aim to develop a transparent merger control regime that promotes long-term economic growth in China.

This book identifies institutional mechanisms that can be used to promote consumer confidence in direct online sales with businesses (B2C e-commerce). It argues that enhancing the access to justice in a multidimensional sense can potentially offer an effective means of boosting consumer confidence. It introduces a conceptual framework for a multidimensional approach to access to justice in the context of consumer protection, describing the various reasonable criteria needed to satisfy consumer demands in B2C e-commerce. The framework, which reflects all essential aspects of consumers' expectations when they engage in online transactions, provides a benchmark for the evaluation of various consumer protection mechanisms. Based on an analysis of different mechanisms and using the framework's criteria, the practice of private ordering, which does not rely on the creation of rules of law but rather on the use of technology as a solution, appears to offer a meaningful way to enhance access to justice in B2C e-commerce. However, though private ordering holds considerable potential, certain weaknesses still need to be eliminated. This book demonstrates how private ordering can be successfully implemented with the help of an intermediary, a neutral third party that plays an integral part in the collaborative task of facilitating various aspects of private ordering, thus helping to limit the risks of failure and ensuring a fairer market setting. In order to move forward, it argues that the state, with its wealth of material resources and incentive options, is the institution best suited to acting as an intermediary in facilitating private ordering. This promising proposal can improve consumer protection, which will in turn boost consumer confidence.

This book examines the relationship between regulation and market integration, with a special focus on China. It pursues a Law and Economics and Comparative Law approach (China and EU) to analyze the current obstacles to market integration and domestic economic growth in China. Topics covered at the national level include competition law, public procurement rules and financial regulation. At the regional and local level, this book addresses questions related to administrative monopolies, self-regulation, legal services markets, and environmental law.

This publication provides an unparalleled comparative analysis of two "hot topics" in the field of antitrust and unfair competition laws with regard to a number of key countries. The first part of the book examines whether small and middle-sized businesses could or should be subject to specific competition rules. These businesses account for 99% of the enterprises in Europe and the United States, making this a particularly important topic. The papers consider both the public and private enforcement rules across a range of jurisdictions and a detailed international report, prepared by Michele Carpagnano, identifies general trends and highlights differences and the most interesting features of national regulations. The second part of the book gathers contributions from various jurisdictions on the unfair competition question of whether a company could or should be protected against the use of their trademark, distinctive signs and other components of their image and identity on the part of non-competing companies. The papers focus on the fundamental issue of the competitive relationship as a condition of protection under unfair competition acts and the connection to intellectual property protection. The comprehensive and insightful international report, prepared by Martine Karsenty-Ricard, brings together these reflections by comparing various national positions. The book also includes the resolutions passed by the General Assembly of the LIDC following a debate on each of these topics, which include proposed solutions and recommendations. The International League of Competition Law (LIDC) is a long-standing international association that focuses on the interface between competition law and intellectual property law, including unfair competition issues.

This book addresses topical development issues in India, ranging from land acquisition, poverty alleviation programs, labor market issues, the public-private partnership (PPP) model and fiscal federalism. It offers an Indian perspective on the dynamics of economic development and the impact the country's legal and public policies have on it. Economic development is a dynamic concept - old problems are solved, while at the same time new issues come to the fore. The emergence of these issues is unique to the development experience of an economy. The book includes sixteen recent contributions and is divided into four sections: law and contract; trade and foreign aid; issues in public economics; and the social sector and poverty alleviation. The chapters reflect on a number of development issues which were of concern for India in the recent past and will be important in her future development initiatives such as land acquisition, agricultural productivity, employment, protection of intellectual property rights, corruption, public-private partnership, regional development, poverty alleviations programs like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and the training of self-help group members, health and education of women, to name a few. The book is a valuable reference resource for policy practitioners and researchers working on the economics of development with special focus on developing economies.

This book is the first study to examine the issue of the legality of parallel imports of trademarked goods under the most important legal systems on an international level, namely under GATT/WTO law, EU law and the laws of the ten major trading partners of the European Union. Part I consists of a general approach to the phenomenon of parallel importation and of a presentation of the theories that have been suggested to resolve the above-mentioned issue. The rule of exhaustion of rights, of which there are three types (rule of national, regional and international exhaustion of rights), is proposed as the most effective instrument to deal with the issue in question. Part II examines the question of exhaustion of trademark rights in light of the provisions of GATT/WTO Law. Part III analyzes the elements of the EU provisions on exhaustion of trademark rights (Articles 7 of Directive 2008/95/EC and 13 of Regulation (EC) 207/2009) and some specific issues relating to the application of these provisions. Part IV presents the regimes of exhaustion of trademark rights recognized in the European Union's current ten most significant trading partners. The book is the first legal study to welcome, in light of economic analysis, the approach adopted by GATT/WTO law and EU law to the question of the geographical scope of the exhaustion of the trademark rights rule. It includes all the case law developed on an international level on the issue of the legality of parallel imports of trademarked goods and a comprehensive overview of the scientific literature concerning the phenomenon of parallel imports in general and the legality of parallel imports of trademarked goods. All the views expressed in the book are based on the European Court of Justice's most recent case law and that of the courts of the most important trading partners of the European Union.

The primary purpose of a patent law system should be to enhance economic efficiency, in particular by providing incentives for making inventions. The conventional wisdom is that patents should therefore be strictly exclusive rights. Moreover, in practice patent owners are almost never forced to give up their right to exclude others and receive only a certain amount of remuneration with, for instance, compulsory licensing. Other economically interesting patent-law objectives, however, include the transfer and dissemination of knowledge. Mechanisms exist by which the patent owner decides if he or she would prefer exclusive or non-exclusive rights, for instance the opportunity to declare the willingness to license and create patent pools. But it is questionable whether these mechanisms are sufficient and efficient enough in view of the existence of patent trolls and other problems. This work challenges the conventional wisdom to a certain extent and makes proposals for improvements.

This book provides a unique comparative and global analysis of the regulation of disclosure in financial (securities) markets. It is written by two authors who represent both the new world (Australia) and the old world (Germany). The authors present their research in the global business context, with legal and regulatory perspectives including some references from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America. After every "boom" and "bust", legislators pass new disclosure legislation, often in a heated environment fuelled by politics and the media. Little regard is paid to existing regulation or the lessons learned from earlier regulation. The result is the continuing enactment of redundant and overlapping disclosure laws. Since financial markets are often described as markets for information, the failure to ensure disclosure is at the heart of financial services regulation. This book argues that the solution to the failure of disclosure is a brief, easily understood, principles-based, plain English safety-net amendment to statute law such as "you must keep the financial market fully informed", a measure that would support effective mandatory continuous disclosure of information to financial markets. This book examines the reasons for disclosure regulation, and how the efficient operation of financial markets is dependent on disclosure. It examines the adequacy of common law and civil law concerning broker/client disclosure, and concludes that industry licensing in itself fails to keep the market informed. While recognizing the failures of securities commissions to achieve good disclosure in financial markets, it confirms the effectiveness of coregulation of disclosure by a commission with the support of the financial markets (such as the stock exchange). Coregulation builds on financial market self-regulation, and is best described in the words of one-time SEC Chairman William O. Douglas, who, in the 1930s, described it as a shotgun behind the door.

This book provides a comprehensive review of the Measures for Administration of Takeover of Chinese Listed Companies (the Chinese takeover law), with emphasis on the differences between the Chinese takeover law and takeover legislation in the UK, the US and Hong Kong. The Chinese M&A market has been booming at an unprecedented rate in recent years; not only domestic investors, but also foreign funds and multinational companies are actively participating on the market. For both market participants and researchers, it is crucial to understand the emerging and transitional aspects of the Chinese economy and its M&A market, and the impacts of those aspects on relevant laws. While there are ongoing academic discussions on the convergence between the Chinese takeover law and its counterparts in the UK, Hong Kong and the US, this book offers a comprehensive discussion of the divergence and focuses on key differences in the transplanted Chinese takeover law.

One of the primary functions of law is to ensure that the legal structure governing all social relations is predictable, coherent, consistent and applicable. Taken together, these characteristics of law are referred to as legal certainty. In traditional approaches to legal certainty, law is regarded as a hierarchical system of rules characterized by stability, clarity, uniformity, calculable enforcement, publicity and predictability. However, the current reality is that national legal systems no longer operate in isolation, but within a multilevel legal order, wherein norms created at both the international and regional level are directly applicable to national legal systems. Also, norm creation is no longer the exclusive prerogative of public officials of the state: private actors have an increasing influence on norm creation as well. Social scientists have referred to this phenomenon of interacting and overlapping competences as multilevel governance. Only recently have legal scholars focused attention on the increasing interconnectedness (and therefore the concomitant loss of primacy of national legal orders) between the global, European and national regulatory spheres through the concept of multilevel regulation. In this project the author uses multilevel regulation as a term to characterize a regulatory space in which the process of rule making, rule enforcement and rule adjudication (the regulatory lifecycle) is dispersed across more than one administrative or territorial level and amongst several different actors, both public and private. The author draws on the concept of a regulatory space, using it as a framing device to differentiate between specific aspects of policy fields. The relationship between actors in such a space is non-hierarchical and they may be independent of each other. The lack of central ordering of the regulatory lifecycle within this regulatory space is the most important feature of such a space. The implications of multilevel regulation for the notion of legal certainty have attracted limited attention from scholars and the demand for legal certainty in regulatory practice is still a puzzle. The book explores the idea of legal certainty in terms of the perceptions and expectations of regulatees in the context of medical products – specifically, pharmaceuticals and medical devices, which can be differentiated as two regulatory spaces and therefore form two case studies. As an exploratory project, the book necessarily explores new territory in terms of investigating legal certainty first in terms of regulatee perceptions and expectations and second, because it studies it in the context of multilevel regulation.

This book addresses two countervailing challenges to theory and policy in law and economics. The first is the rise of legal origins theory, which denies the comparative law view of convergence between common law and civil law by the assertion of an economic superiority of common law. The second is the series of economic crises in the very financial markets on which that assertion was based. Both trends unsettled certainties about the rule of law and institutional economics. Meeting legal origins theory in its main areas of political science, sociology and economics, the book extends the interdisciplinary reach to neglected aspects of comparative law, legal history, dynamic econometric analysis and "quasi-natural experiments" with counterfactual evidence of different institutional regimes in divided countries. These combined methodological tools make tests of the economic impact of different legal origins much more reliable. This is shown for developed and newly industrialized countries as well as developing, transforming and emerging countries with or without financial center advantage, affected or not by financial crises. The Asian financial crises and the American subprime crisis have been, or could have been resolved using the resources of common law or civil law. These cases and data on access to justice in Africa, Asia and Latin America reveal the problem of substantive law remaining "law on the books" without efficient procedural rules and judicial structures. The single most striking common law-civil law divide is that lawyer-dominated common law procedure is slower and costlier than judge-managed civil law procedure. Countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Japan, and China show functional interaction between culture and law in legal reforms. Such interaction can reduce the occurrence of legal disputes as well as facilitate their resolution. It can use economic crises as catalysts for legal reforms or rely on regional integration, and it should replace the discredited method of legal "transplants" by sustained dialogue between legal advisors and all actors involved in legal reforms.

The importance of international maritime labour law - both as a component of - ternational maritime law, and in socio-political and economic terms - has been recognised by the IMO International Maritime Law Institute for a number of years. Indeed, the Institute has annually organised a course on maritime labour law with the participation of inter alia the International Maritime Organization, the - ternational Labour Organization, the International Transport Workers' Federation, and the German Shipowners' Association. It was therefore a great pleasure when the authors invited me to introduce their forthcoming monograph on Maritime Work Law Fundamentals: Responsible S- powners Reliable Seafarers. As the title suggests, a fundamental challenge of this branch of international maritime law is to achieve a balance between the interests of the two main stakeholders. Institutionally, the effort to achieve this balance dates back a number of decades with its genesis mainly found in the work of the International Labour Organization. It has to be said that whilst this effort achieved great progress, it has led to a haphazard, plethora of legal instruments.

This work is an assessment of how to manage risk in property transactions in the context of the move from paper-based to electronic conveyancing (eConveyancing). In particular the focus is on risks that impact on title registration, and the security, protection or lack thereof that this registration offers to land owners, third parties and property claimants. The impact is the extent to which a change in the transactional process may unintentionally affect risk (being the consequence of change and the likelihood of that consequence having a negative effect). The risks are identified, analysed and evaluated against the backdrop of title registration and the development of eConveyancing through a comparative analysis of the systems in Ireland and Ontario, while also referencing other developing electronic systems around the globe.

The present book examines both theoretical and practical aspects of the law on indications of geographical origin (IGOs) within the framework of European Union (EU) law, pursuing four distinct yet mutually related aims. First, it discusses theoretical issues of the law on IGOs including its historical foundations, terminology, principles of regulation, legal subjectivity, protection models and loss of protection. Second, it covers the EU law on IGOs from a systematic point of view. Particularly, the systematic review of the EU law on IGOs includes an in-depth analysis of and commentary on the relevant and applicable regulations. Third, it examines current legislative initiatives and further development options for the EU law on IGOs. Finally, it reveals the interrelation of the EU law on one hand and the national laws of EU Member States on the other with regard to IGOs, focusing on harmonized and non-harmonized areas of law.

This book focuses on the analysis of liability rules of tort law from an efficiency perspective, presenting a comprehensive analysis of these rules in a self-contained and rigorous yet accessible manner. It establishes general results on the efficiency of liability rules, including complete characterizations of efficient liability rules and efficient incremental liability rules. The book also establishes that the untaken precaution approach and decoupled liability are incompatible with efficiency. The economic analysis of tort law has established that for efficiency it is necessary that each party to the interaction must be made to internalize the harm resulting from the interaction. The characterization and impossibility theorems presented in this book establish that, in addition to internalization of the harm by each party, there are two additional requirements for efficiency. Firstly, rules must be immune from strategic manipulation. Secondly, rules must entail closure with respect to the parties involved in the interaction giving rise to the negative externality, i.e., the liability must not be decoupled.