THE FRENCH RESPONSE TO THE WORLD BANK'S <i>DOING BUSINESS</i> REPORTS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In its 2004 and 2006 Doing Business reports, the World Bank endorsed the conclusions advanced in the ‘legal origins’ literature, according to which legal systems belonging to the common law tradition better foster economic performance than systems belonging to the civil law tradition, and systems within the French family fare the worst among civil law systems. This article comments on the response offered to those reports by a group of French legal academics. The author suggests that this response would be more effective if it treated as separate issues (1) the traditional resistance of French jurists to the economic analysis of law (eal), (2) the efficiency of the French legal system, and (3) the merits of analysing French law from an eal perspective. With respect to the first issue, the author argues that the reasons behind the French jurists' traditional resistance to eal are largely sociocultural and, accordingly, can be expected to bear directly on French jurists, and French legal thought more generally, but only minimally on the economic pedigree of the French legal system. With respect to the second issue, questions are raised as to the possibility of reliably assessing the relative efficiency of entire legal systems, whether the French or any other. With respect to the third issue, the author notes that the objections raised against economic assessments of entire legal systems do not apply to the more traditional form of eal, which accordingly remains as valuable a tool for analysing French law as it is for analysing any other body of law.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.023 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".