Making it easier to enforce contracts in the Asia-Pacific region: recommendations and challenges

This paper builds on the experience gained during five years of participation in the ‘Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) Project on Enforcing Contracts’ (the ‘Project’). The Project was aimed at improving the legal environment for enforcing contracts in ten different economies in the Asia-Pacific region from 2011 to 2015. This paper outlines key aspects of the Project including the World Bank Doing Business indicator, which was used as a benchmark for the Project, and analyses the progress made by APEC and other target economies during the five-year period. It further provides an overview of recommendations suggested to improve the enforcing contract environment in those economies, which were provided by local and Korean legal experts as well as the Secretariat of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). The paper further takes note of reforms captured in the Doing Business reports and illustrates reforms implemented by the target economies following the Project. The objective of this paper is to set forth challenges and lessons learned during the Project. By doing so, it hopes to provide some guidance on continuation of the Project and for carrying out similar technical assistance and capacity building activities for law reform. For that purpose, it examines the appropriateness of using the Doing Business indicators for the Project and the role of champion economies in the Project. It further suggests ways to implement reforms to promote arbitration as an alternative means of resolving commercial disputes. Lastly, the paper illustrates some key challenges in carrying out judicial and arbitration reforms. It concludes by highlighting the importance of contract enforcement for economic development and sustainable growth and the critical role that target economies play in implementing reforms suggested during the Project.