E, no pino do Verão, um bocadinho de Direito para lembrar às hostes que nem toda a gente está de férias
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"Malasya and Indonesia couldn´t be called twins, but they might be called siblings. The adjacent Southeast Asian nations possess similar natural resources and their citizens speak similar languages and follow similar strains of Islam. But Malaysia's economy is prospering while Indonesia's is floundering. Malaysia's stock market is far more vibrant than its neighbor's, and its average resident is three times richer. (...) [A possible explanation for this] lies in the countries' legal systems, however. Malaysia was a British colony and its legal system is based on the common law: the set of rules, norms, and procedures that has guided the legal system of England and the British Empire for about nine centuries. Indonesia was a Dutch colony and its legal system derives from French civil law, a set of statutes and principles written under Napoleon in the early 19th century and imposed upon the lands he conquered, including the Netherlands. (...)

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The idea that legal origin can explain national market diferences comes from four economists who are referred to in their field by the acronym LLSV: Rafael La Porta of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes of the Yale School of Management, Andrei Shleifer of Harvard's economics department, and Robert Vishny of the University of Chicago's business school. (...)

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LLSV's initial work examined why some government regulations of markets succeed in creating and maintaining an environment where people want to invest, and others don't. Intrigued by what seemed like patterns related to legal history, LLSV built a database that included every country with a stock market in the world and then classified each country's legal origins. The group then ran mathematical tests to determine correlations between legal origin and other variables like measures of corruption and indices of shareholder rights. In 1998, their first major paper, "Law and Finance," set off a firestorm. (...)

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"Law and Finance" showed that common law countries protect both shareholders and creditors better than civil law countries do, and they also tend to be less corrupt. LLSV took dozens of specific financial indicators—ranging from key gauges, like the odds that a company's assets will be confiscated by the state, to smaller measures, like whether shareholders can vote at company meetings—and regressed them all against legal origin. The regressions showed that the measures that indicate high investor and creditor protection or low corruption connect to common law origin, just as height connects to weight. The measures that represent low protection and high corruption connect to civil law origin. "

Para quem se interessar, e para quem quiser conhecer as críticas apontadas a esta tese, recomendo a leitura deste artigo na Legal Affairs.