From Liberalism to Regionalism: an Assessment of the Experiences in Legal Reform and Development in Asia and Latin America

• In Event: Transnational Capitalism, Local Actors

Abstract

The idea of promoting legal reforms in developing countries under the sponsorship of a foreign or international entity has been one of the most debated subjects in the law and development scholarship. The World Bank has emerged as the most important actor engaging in aid to technical legal assistance projects, which became the target of numerous criticisms by scholars and policymakers across the regions where such reforms are carried out.
Two of these regions – Asia and Latin America – have become particularly important for the study of legal reform projects. On the one hand, Latin America has been the laboratory of almost every model of development, with little success or even disastrous results that are yet to be recovered. On the other hand, Asia has been regarded as an example of successful economic policy resulting from market-based reforms, although with debatable achievements in political and civil rights.
This paper compares and criticizes the models of legal reform carried out by the World Bank in Asia and Latin America, in order to understand the development of the current values and attitudes adopted by this organization in pursuing such initiatives. For this purpose, the research will first discuss the evolution of the theoretical underpinnings of the World Bank’s policies on legal reforms. Second, it will compare a number of projects conducted in each region, mainly in the form of the so-called Doing Business methodology, in order to observe the reactions of the World Bank to the tension between regional particularities and global prescriptions.

Author

• Yi Shin Tang, University of São Paulo