Responsive Regulation and Comparative Consumer Product Safety
This paper, an edited and footnoted transcript of a presentation at a research Centre of Excellence at Hokkaido University, looks at the influence of “responsive regulation” theory on the large-scale “Australian Consumer Law” reforms enacted in 2010. It outlines some frameworks developed for a chapter on “Product Safety Regulation” in the Handbook of Research on International Consumer Law (Elgar, 2010), considering ways in which the government (primarily through public regulation), courts (primarily through product liability law) and markets can create incentives to supply safe consumer goods. These frameworks also permit better cross-jurisdictional comparisons, with this paper highlighting major developments also in Japan, Europe, the United States, and international trade law. The paper ends by highlighting implications for other areas of contemporary consumer law, especially consumer credit. As in many countries nowadays regarding consumer goods, including belatedly Australia, responsive regulation theory suggests that there should be scope to add a duty on suppliers of credit to disclose serious problems or risks afflicting their consumer borrowers.
The ABCs of Product Safety Re-regulation in Japan:
Australia is considering a full-scale Free Trade Agreement with Japan. This gives added importance to the trajectory of Japanese product safety regulations, and consumer law more generally. Generally, Japan has been dismantling ex ante regulation while strengthening private liability regimes, especially information disclosure obligations, over its ‘lost decade’ of economic stagnation since the early 1990s. Yet it has also re-regulated more broadly in response to safety concerns, as evidenced by four recent case studies involving asbestos (for the third time), buildings, electrical goods, and elevators manufactured by a market leader worldwide. This makes Japan converge on a broader pattern identified within ‘global business regulation’, and makes it likely that the nation (like Australia) will revamp general consumer product regulation along recently revised European Union lines. Yet Japan’s regulatory mix still diverges from that in several other industrialised democracies, particularly in the prominent roles played by criminal prosecutions and the spectre of state liability.
Comparative Analysis of the Main Business Intelligence Solutions
Nowadays, Business Intelligence solutions are the main tools for analyzing and monitoring the companyâ€™s performance at any organizational level. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the most powerful Business Intelligence solutions using a set of technical features such as infrastructure of the platform, development facilities, complex analysis tools, interactive dashboards and scorecards, mobile integration and complex implementation of performance management methodologies.