The Economics of Harmonisation: Implications for Reform of Commercial Law and Regulation in New Zealand
This paper provides an economic assessment of the costs and benefits of harmonising New Zealand's commercial laws and regulations with those in Australia or with an OECD norm. It argues that unless the definition of harmonisation is limited to mutual recognition the economics literature surveyed does not support a general presumption in favour of harmonisation of commercial laws.The absence of any presumption in favour of harmonisation is based on the infeasibility of full harmonisation while New Zealand maintains political independence and on the overall requirement for an assessment of the efficiency of any law in the context of the New Zealand economy
Securities market infrastructure for small countries
The development of liquid, efficient securities markets has been a major goal for policy makers in the third world. Casual empiricism suggests that small countries are unlikely to obtain liquid securities markets. There are only 16 countries in the world where the annual turnover on the stock market exceeds 75% of the market capitalisation of the stock market. All but one of these countries has a GDP of above $20 billion. In this paper, we offer some conceptual insights into the problems of obtaining liquid securities markets in small countries. We use cross-country datasets and case studies to obtain some empirical insights into the questions. Finally, we offer some policy proposals for strategies that could be adopted in small countries. ∗IGIDR, Bombay. Email ajayshah@igidr.ac.in and susant@igidr.ac.in, and URLs and on the web. This paper was prepared as part of the World Bank’s project Policy for Small Financial Systems. We thank Shantanu Bharadwaj for able research assistance. We are grateful to Tadashi Endo, Mathew Rudolph, James Hanson and Giovanni Majnoni for comments and suggestions, to Tony Weeresinghe of Millennium Information Technologies and Satish Naralkar of NSE.IT for help in estimating the capital cost of securities infrastructure, and to Brett Tarleton of Elkins/McSherry, LLC, New York, who made their cross-country dataset about equity transactions costs available to us.
The Pharmaceutical Industry
‘‘It has now been more than fifteen years since Robert Swanson, a young man who understood both finance and science, invited Herbert Boyer, a shy molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, out for a beer. Swanson described his vision to Boyer: that the techniques and ideas that Boyer had devised for manipulating DNA could be translated into products at a private company yet to be established. As a result of that meeting, Genentech, the first well-known biotechnology corporation, was founded; Swanson and Boyer made their fortunes; and profound changes ensued in academic biomedical research, ’