This chapter seeks to provide a general overview of insolvency systems around the world, providing examples and references from more than fifty jurisdictions from Asia and the Pacific, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Due to a variety of factors, including legal origins, legal transplants, and the adoption of "international best practices," this chapter shows that insolvency laws in advanced economies and emerging economies share many similarities. Therefore, the primary divergences between insolvency systems in advanced economies and emerging markets are not found on the "law on the books" but on the market and institutional environments in which insolvency law operates. For that reason, insolvency law in many emerging economies has failed to deliver the expected goals and ultimately serve as a catalyst for growth. Therefore, insolvency law in emerging economies needs to be reinvented.

This chapter argues that, even if emerging economies actively promote hybrid procedures and workouts and they create a simplified insolvency framework for micro- and small enterprises (MSEs), ordinary insolvency proceedings will still play a significant role in the economy. On the one hand, they will serve as the primary mechanism for the reallocation of assets of nonviable medium and large enterprises (MLEs). On the other hand, formal reorganization procedures can still be relevant for viable MLEs unable to complete a workout or hybrid procedure due to the lack of trust on the debtor’s management team or the need to use some provisions exclusively available in formal insolvency proceedings. Therefore, emerging economies should make sure to improve the efficiency of their ordinary insolvency proceedings. Nonetheless, they cannot adopt the type of complex procedure heavily supervised by courts existing in countries with strong institutional environments. Instead, they should design a procedure requiring a minimum involvement of courts. The chapter explains how this goal can be achieved while enhancing the attractiveness of ordinary insolvency proceeding for debtors and creditors.

This chapter begins a series of chapters on the tax treatment of dealings in interests in corporations, and particularly shares. Shares may be created, transferred and terminated (holding being dealt with in earlier chapters). This chapter deals with the creation of shares and begins with a discussion of the issue of shares for cash versus the issue of shares for non-business assets. Whatever the form of consideration provided, the assets contributed to a corporation are duplicated or reflected in the value of the shares. Shares as assets deriving their value from corporate assets and activities is a theme of the remainder of the book. With respect to contributions of assets for shares, the primary issue is whether the transfer of assets to the corporation gives rise to the taxation of build in gains for the transferor. Often countries provide relief from this charge (rollover) and in doing so challenge the separate identity of the corporation for tax purposes. The focus of the chapter is on incorporation of a business and the different ways in which countries structure qualification for relief on incorporation.

Crisis research focuses primarily on how response structures should be organized. There are ongoing debates about the required degree of flexibility in the response structure and what role emergent groups should have. A shared assumption in this research is that organization and structure are synonymous with order in a crisis and enable a rapid, coordinated response. Disorganization, by extension, is criticized for crisis response failures. This view ignores the risk of over-organization and crisis response rigidity. In uncertain crises, disorganizing might produce a looser, less ordered structure that facilitates a novel, adaptive response. The dilemma for frontline responders revolves around the need for both organizing and disorganizing during crises. It is worthwhile noting that different types and phases of the crisis demand different forms of reorganizing. The reorganizing process, through disorganizing and organizing, needs to be ongoing throughout the duration of the crisis situation to ensure that crisis demands and organizational response structures evolve synchronously.

The post-Frederician Prussian army cultivated the glory of the past, but also experienced continuous debates and reforms intending to optimize the army according to the principles of enlightened rationalism. The confrontation with the French revolutionary armies activated intensive discussions, but for the military authorities, the experiences did not call for principal doubts about the suitability of the army. The defeat of 1806, however, did. The following reforms had to handle elementary needs to re-establish the armed forces, but also took the opportunity to create new organisational frameworks and to introduce new principles for recruitment, military justice and officers’ careers. From a quantitative perspective, the important measures converged on the implementation of a general conscription, and from a qualitative perspective, they especially targeted reconciling the educated middle-class with military service. When the break with France in 1813 effaced the previously existing restrictions, the plans resulted not only in an augmentation of the standing army, but in the establishment of complementary military formations of own characters. Their coexistence reflected organisational constraints, as well as different aspects of the previous debates. Although not without improvisations, the authorities were able to increase the armed forces more than sevenfold within about nine months.

Control is a capability that has to be learned. In PCT learning is called reorganization and it is assumed to be a biased random-walk process, similar to the process used by the E. coli bacteria to navigate to food sources. Research on reorganization is aimed at showing how this reorganization process works in the context of a hierarchical model of purposeful behavior. We also discuss possible ways to investigate the role of consciousness in reorganization.