A project on Labour Law and Poverty Alleviation in Low- and Middle-Income Countries will be funded under the joint ESRC/DFID Joint Scheme on International Development (Poverty Alleviation) from January 2013. The aim of the project is to develop a diagnostic tool or template to assist policy makers and regulators involved in labour law reforms in developing countries.
The project will be directed by Professor Simon Deakin of the Centre for Business Research (CBR), working with Shelley Marshall of Monash University, Colin Fenwick and Corinne Vargha of the International Labour Office, Geneva, and Ajit Singh of the CBR. The research will take the form of case studies to be conducted in four countries (Cambodia, China, India and South Africa) and econometric analysis of data on a number of legal and economic indicators. The work will be carried out with the collaboration of local research partners in the case study countries.
Research on Law, Development and Finance in Rising Powers will begin in April 2013, under the auspices of the ESRC’s research programme on Rising Powers and Interdependent Futures. This project will examine the role of law in economic development in the ‘rising powers’ of Brazil, China, India and Russia. Specifically, it will analyse to what extent the quality of legal and other formal institutions has affected financial development and economic growth in these countries, and whether reliance on informal institutions poses an obstacle to their future growth. The project will adopt an inter-disciplinary, multi-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis. The project will be directed by Professor Simon Deakin for the CBR and will involve collaboration with researchers from Durham, Leicester, Loughborough and Oxford Universities, and with research partners in the case study countries.