Incorporating Anglo-American Reorganization Provisions in Bankruptcy Law： A 10-year Lesson From Thailand

This paper examines the appropriateness of the adoption of Anglo-American type of reorganization provisions into national bankruptcy law using Thailand as a sample. It argues that such adoption shall be cautious. Since Thailand started to accommodate such provisions, reorganization, apparently, has limited usefulness--benefitting only large-scale debtors because it does not fit with the nature of Thai business culture, i.e., the borrowing-lending relationship and less-than-arm＇s length business connections. On average, only every one in 200 bankruptcy cases employs reorganization; the rest goes for liquidation but the average outstanding debt in reorganization is over 30 times higher than liquidation. Interestingly, the adjudication rate of reorganization is faster than those of liquidation. Debtors＇ strategic use of the law and the procedural bias are suspected. Debt restructuring led by the central bank in cooperation with commercial banks, instead, is overwhelmingly more successful, equally efficient, and effective because any ailing firm can renegotiate its borrowing contract rather easily in the low transaction cost environment. Debt restructuring outperformed reorganization roughly 800 and two times in terms of cases and debt amount respectively. Thus, the adoption of non-indigenous provisions shall be made prudently. This argument applies towards the standardization of insolvency legislation. Standardizing bankruptcy procedures shall be made carefully and national economic conditions including local business nature and uniqueness are worth examined before any enactment or amendment. Otherwise, benefits of international trade and investment would be achieved at the expense of economic efficiency.

China’s Labor Standard Legislation: Confused Reality and Unclear Future

The reasons why labor standards law has not been enacted so far include the unreadiness of entrepreneurs and enterprises as well as legislators and the market. It is a great challenge for legislators because they need to focus on the coordination of relationship between central and local labor standards legislation,on special problems of sectors or industries,on coordination of special industries and general industries. in addition to many other historical factors. The introduction of labor standards legislation must be based on a good familiarity of current situation and international labor standards,the frequent points of labor disputes in China,and the specific characteristics of different regions and industries,which is also the mission and responsibility of the legislators.

Damage Analysis of the Great East Japan Earthquake

This paper tries to comprehensively summarize the reasons of damages at the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011 and what are the lessons in terms of earthquake and tsunami safety of building and cities. The paper examines the damage of tsunami affected areas and analyses the damage to extract lessons in order to safely reconstruct the affected areas from the view point of building regulations such as ＂Disaster Risk Area＂ provided by the Article 39 of the Building Standard Law and the Urbanization Control Area and UPA （Urbanization Promotion Area） provided by the Article 8 of the Ordinance of the City Planning Law of Japan.

Policy Analysis on Building Regulations and the Recovery of Earthquake and Tsunami Affected Areas

The paper examines the situation and causes of recent big earthquake and tsunami disasters especially in the case of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, and analyzes the damage to extract lessons on safety of buildings and recovery of cities from the view point of building regulations such as the Article 39 of the Building Standard Law. In addition, the Article 8 of the Ordinance of City Planning Law resulted in not so effective against tsunami in March 2011. Control mechanisms of building construction should be integrated into socio-economic, institutional, technical and other policy tools. In order to mitigate earthquake risk, all stages of building construction, from location, planning and construction to maintenance are important. Awareness creation is instrumental for building culture of safety and demands for intervention in disaster mitigation. The demands ultimately help in creating conducive environment for policy intervention, in realizing institutional mechanism of building code enforcement and land use control for the municipal authorities and in creating demand for competent professionals.