Law, Development and Finance in Rising Powers

该项目将探索法律在中国、俄罗斯、印度和巴西这四个正在崛起的大国的经济发展中的作用。十多年来，在世界银行和西方政府的鼓励下，发展中国家实施了法律和金融改革计划，将国有银行和企业私有化与加强对股东和债权人的法律保护结合起来。这些改革举措得到了研究的支持，研究表明，管理公司治理和金融市场的法律框架在为低收入和中等收入国家的经济增长创造条件方面可以发挥关键作用。最近，一项基于新兴市场案例研究的新兴实证研究表明，以法律为中心的改革无关紧要或适得其反。有人认为，正式的法律制度排挤了建立在信任基础上的经济合作，并阻碍了激进国家的发展作用。在这方面，中国的例子经常被引用。中国的快速经济增长与非正式商业网络的持续作用以及地方和中央两级国家机构的积极参与有关。中国的案例也展示了排序的优势，国有企业的部分私有化伴随着股票市场的发展和法律制度的发展而进行。相比之下，在俄罗斯，上世纪90年代初的大规模私有化发生在法律机构尚未成熟的时候。按照西方模式发展起来的“自我执行”公司法模式，未能催生出流动性强、透明度高的资本市场。自20世纪90年代末以来，俄罗斯的经济权力重新集中在国家以及一体化的金融和工业企业集团手中。虽然这两个案例在排序问题上具有启发性，但从它们中吸取更广泛的关于法律在发展中的作用的经验教训并不简单。中国最近的经验表明，发展中的法律框架在克服基于信任的非正式经济中的增长限制方面具有价值，而俄罗斯正在积极寻求建立必要的法律和监管结构，以促进基于市场的金融发展。在巴西，Novo Mercado的例子表明，允许公司选择加入基于股东权利的监管制度的战略，可以在新兴市场背景下促进股权融资流动。Novo Mercado是一个新的股票市场细分市场，吸引了大量高科技IPO。在印度也是如此，有一些证据表明，最近的公司治理改革提高了上市公司的透明度，增强了投资者的信心，尽管对改革进程持批评态度的人士认为，改革还不够深入。从这些经历中出现的情况是，正式和非正式机构的运作不一定紧张。相反，它们可以在为可持续经济增长和社会发展提供基础方面相辅相成。我们的研究将通过对宏观和微观数据的量化分析和在有关国家的广泛实地工作相结合来探索这一过程。使用这些多重方法，我们将对法律制度在经济发展中的作用得出比迄今更丰富和更细微的图景。这项工作将使人们更清楚地了解新兴市场增长的体制障碍，以及法律和金融改革在克服这些障碍方面的作用。它将引起国际金融机构和国家一级政府的政策制定者以及一系列私营部门行为者的极大兴趣，其中包括在新兴大国经济中有利益关系的工业、金融和法律服务公司。

The project will explore the role of law in economic development in the four 'rising powers' of China, Russia, India and Brazil. For over a decade, with the encouragement of the World Bank and western governments, developing countries have adopted programmes of legal and financial reform combining privatisation of state-owned banks and enterprises with the enactment of enhanced legal protections for shareholders and creditors. These reform initiatives were supported by research which suggested that the legal framework governing corporate governance and financial markets had a pivotal role to play in creating the conditions for economic growth in low and middle-income countries. More recently, an emerging body of empirical work, based on case studies of emerging markets including those of the 'rising powers', suggests that law-centred reforms have been irrelevant or counter-productive. Formal legal institutions, it is suggested, crowd out economic cooperation based on trust, and obstruct the developmental role of the activist state. The example of China is often cited in this regard. China's rapid economic growth has been associated with a continuing role for informal business networks and with the active involvement of state institutions at both local and central level. China's case also demonstrates the advantages of sequencing, with partial privatization of state-owned enterprises proceeding alongside the growth of stock markets and the development of legal institutions. In Russia, by contrast, the mass privatisation of the early 1990s occurred before legal institutions had had time to mature. A 'self-enforcing' corporate law model, developed along western lines, failed to generate liquid and transparent capital markets. Since the late 1990s, Russia has seen a reconcentration of economic power in the hands of the state and of integrated financial and industrial enterprise groups. While these two cases are instructive on the issue of sequencing, drawing wider lessons from them on the role of law in development is, however, not straightforward. China's recent experience demonstrates the value of a developing legal framework in overcoming limits to growth in an informal, trust-based economy, while Russia is actively seeking to put in place the necessary legal and regulatory structures for market-based financial development. In Brazil, the example of the Novo Mercado, a new stock market segment which has attracted a large number of high-tech IPOs, suggests that a strategy of allowing firms to opt into a shareholder-rights based regulatory regime can work in promoting flows of equity finance in an emerging market context. In India, too, there is some evidence that recent corporate governance reforms have led to greater transparency on the part of listed firms and to increased investor confidence, although critics of the reform process argue that it has not gone far enough. The picture emerging from these experiences is one in which formal and informal institutions do not necessarily operate in tension. Rather, they may complement each other in providing the foundations for sustainable economic growth and societal development. Our research will explore this process through a combination of quantitative analysis of macro and micro-level data and extensive field work in the countries concerned. Using these multiple methods, we will arrive at a richer and more nuanced picture of the role of the legal system in economic development than has so far been obtained. The work will provide a clearer understanding of the institutional barriers to growth in emerging markets and of the role of legal and financial reforms in overcoming them. It will be of considerable interest to policy-makers in international financial institutions and national-level governments and to a range of private-sector actors including industrial, financial and legal service firms with interests in the economies of the rising powers.