Harmonisation and the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods

After many years of negotiation, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (“CISG”) came into force in 1988. Today, 62 states have adopted the CISG. Together these countries account for over two-thirds of all world trade.2 On this basis alone, the CISG is an outstanding success in the legal harmonisation of the law governing the international sale of goods. However, the CISG has its critics and much comment has been made on the failure of the CISG to achieve its goal of promoting international trade through a body of uniform rules.The primary motivation driving the push for a harmonised law on the international sale of goods is economic: a harmonised law makes it easier and more efficient for the business person to sell and buy goods across state borders. However, the engine driving the push for harmonisation is political and cultural; and the task of creating the harmonised law belongs to the diplomat.3 A study of the CISG demonstrates that the political and cultural demands on the diplomat also act as shackles that restrain the achievement of a harmonised law.This paper will consider the CISG and discuss the constraints on treaty making as a mechanism for legal harmonisation. Part one discusses the constraints faced when creating a uniform text.Part two discusses the problems with the text of the CISG that result from the negotiation process. Finally, part three discusses the constraints faced in maintaining the uniformity of the CISG.

Financial integration: the role of tradable and non-tradable goods

This paper examines the potential benefits of financial integration focusing on the role of tradable and non-tradable goods. We construct a new country-level index for tradability of output using disaggregate sector level data on output, imports and exports. Cross-country regressions show that for the overall sample, there is a weak positive interaction of tradibility of output and financial integration. When we focus on those countries within a middle range of institutional development, and thus within the middle range of income per capita, for these countries, the experience of integration is tempered significantly by increasing tradability of output. Sector-level regressions confirm the negative and significant interaction of trade and financial integration for this sample of countries.

What's in a name? Software, digital products, and the sale of goods

This article addresses how the advent of trade in computer software, and nowdigital products, has challenged the application of sales law and consumer law.It addresses the law of three jurisdictions: the United Kingdom (‘UK’),Australia and New Zealand. Often, applying the ‘goods’ criterion in theseregimes will be uncontroversial. Nevertheless, modern market conditions havecreated a need to move beyond the existing question of whether softwareconstitutes ‘goods’, and instead to ask how a range of different types of digitalproducts fit into sales law and consumer law regimes. Many legal systems havesettled the software-as-goods question. However, software is only one kind ofcommonly traded digital product. This article argues that other types of digitalproducts — including apps, firmware, digital music and electronic books —should be treated the same way as software by sales law and consumer lawregimes. Recent developments in UK consumer law are also analysed as aninnovative model for reform regarding party rights and obligations in the supplyof digital products.