Volume 10, Issue 1

Concepts of pre-contractual good faith, culpa in contrahendo and promissory estoppel have received increasing attention from legal scholars, law makers and practitioners. Those concepts appear as fundamental in all civil and common law systems and yet as ones whose nature and contents are still ill-defined. Moreover, recent doctrinal developments in Chinese and in the modernized French Law of contracts call for further systematic assessment. This paper fills the gap by providing an evaluation of the English, French, German and Chinese law of contracts. It offers a comparative law and economics evaluation and argues that those duties serve as a multi-functional judicial mechanism enabling ex post screening between socially desirable and undesirable behavior. They set the behavioral standards and serve as deterrence mechanisms that attempt to discourage certain socially undesirable behaviour in the course of the negotiations. The paper seeks to find out what new light the comparative law and economic analysis can shed on the issues of pre-contractual good faith, culpa in contrahendo and promissory estoppel to help to clarify it.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of the tax tribunal, and the functions of its dispute resolution decisions according to a law and economics perspective. We show that the tax agency can use the tax tribunal as a screening device. That is, the tax agency can inform taxpayers of income tax that minimizes their expected costs, and then can screen taxpayers based on whether they appeal to the tax tribunal.

This paper studies the theoretical underpinning of anti-competitive behaviour of state monopolies under different economics approaches and focuses particularly on the Structure–Conduct–Performance (SCP) paradigm. It argues that the market conduct of state monopolies is no different from that of other firms and market power serves as the motivation for anti-competitive behaviour of firms. The paper ends with a discussion about Vietnam’s state monopolies and how their anti-competitive behaviour is explained from the viewpoint of the economics approach.

Medical malpractice is a form of professional negligence and such a negligence forms part of the law of tort. As an alternative to the tort or fault-based system in medical malpractice, a no-fault compensation system has been viewed as having the potential to overcome problems inherent in the tort system. This is through the provision of fair, speedy and adequate compensation for medically injured victims. A no-fault compensation system allows patients to be compensated without proof of provider’s fault or negligence. Similar to no-fault schemes, the strict liability system is not fault-based although it belongs to tort law. Successful claims are paid in a uniform manner using a fixed benefits schedule and include compensation for both economic and non-economic (pain and suffering losses) without the necessity of proving negligence through a tort claim. This study focuses on the comparison of no-fault compensation systems versus strict liability systems between Vietnam to Belgium, France, and England. The distinctions in Belgium, France, and England can be the lessons for the development of a no-fault compensation system as well as strict liability system in Vietnam.

Inefficiencies and rigidities in the supply of inputs caused by strict laws and regulation could lead to distortions in the production structures of firms. These distortions, when magnified, can have adverse effects on the economic performance of a country. The study by Botero et al. (Botero, Juan C., Simeon Djankov, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez de-Silanes, and Andrei Shleifer. 2004. “The Regulation of Labor.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 119: 1339–1382.) among others, has observed that richer counties with social welfare supports tend to regulate labour less than relatively poorer countries; but, these studies concentrate mainly on country-wide or cross-country data leaving out variations exclusively found in micro-level data. This study fills a gap in the literature by conducting a comprehensive study of the effects of labour laws on output and productivity of manufacturing firms in Indian states. Unlike previous studies which measure the strength of labour regulation by interpreting labour laws, this study measures the same by mining information from case-law citations of labour laws and builds an index of labour litigiousness which proxies for the strength of labour regulation. Results show that labour litigation and industrial disputes have significant negative influences on both output and productivity of manufacturing firms.