Insolvency Law Reforms in Asian Developing Countries

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.