Business Law Transplants and Economic Development: An Empirical Study of Contract Enforcement in Dakar, Senegal

One of the latest priorities of the current law and development agenda consists in the creation of "investment climates" favoring the development of markets, through the adoption by developing countries of business regulation based on the "best practices" found in richer countries. Despite acknowledgements that the transfer of legal models from one country to another often leads to poor results, the question of the "fit" required between transplanted laws and local environments is either ignored or treated as a technical matter best dealt with by local legal professionals. In the whole process, the point of view of the reforms' end-users, i.e. the firms operating in developing countries, is conspicuously missing.;The second part of the dissertation presents and analyses the results of 30 in-depth interviews conducted with small- and medium-sized enterprises operating in Dakar, Senegal. Dakar SMEs are shown to exhibit a very high degree of flexibility in the enforcement of their contracts, with the "quality" of the legal system playing a very minor role in their choice of an enforcement strategy. The general business environment---characterized by the presence of important financial constraints and a high level of uncertainty and interdependence between firms---stands out as the most important determinant of disputing preferences.;In the third part, the implications of the findings for current theories about the role of contract law in development and, more generally, in business relationships, are discussed. It is suggested that seeing law reform as key to solving Dakar firms' "enforcement problems" misses the point and may create new problems for SMEs, without solving the most pressing issues they face.;This dissertation consists in an empirically-based investigation of the impact of business law reform with respect to one of the top priorities identified by the World Bank, i.e. the enforcement of business contracts. In the first part, the assumptions upon which the current reforms are based are examined in the light of contributions from the fields of comparative law, management, economics, sociology and anthropology. Diverse factors---cultural, economic, and structural---hypothesized to account for the limited impact of legal transfers on behaviour are reviewed.