Finance, Law, and the Crisis of COVID-19

We are facing an unprecedented economic crisis. Inequality between borrowers and entrepreneurs in the financial market is growing, especially as creditors use misselling and take advantage of their clients’ vulnerability. This chapter compares the sanctioning of granting credit in violation of Directive 2008/48/EC on consumer credit in Polish and French law and assesses its implementation in those regimes. It also compares the policies of both countries in the field of borrower protection during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research uses a dogmatic analysis of EU, Polish and French law and compares the implementation of directive 2008/48/EC. The analytical method was used to evaluate the commercial practices of creditors and the actions of national authorities. The results show that the sanctions and procedures adopted by these countries differ, although in each case the obligations of borrowers are identical. Different remedies have been adopted in the two countries to protect borrowers during the pandemic. This leads to the conclusion that consumer protection has not been sufficiently harmonised by the directive. Doubts as to whether the purpose of the directive has been achieved are confirmed by its planned revision. It must be concluded that the current economic crisis highlights the inconsistency in consumer protection. Binding sanctions for Member States should be specified in the directive. It would be more beneficial to the protection of the collective interests of consumers if the directive were to include remedial procedures, such as credit moratoria, which the Member States will be obliged to implement during the economic crisis.

Corporate social responsibility plays a vital role in the development of society. In India, the study found significant contributions by both the corporate sector and the government to create a more sustainable society. Women’s empowerment is a part of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), wherein the objective is to provide support to women in their quest for equality in the family and society through training, suggestions and financial support. Formation of SHG (Self-Help Groups) is a medium to reach to women and help them to work under various functions. The study examine the women empowerment through CSR in terms of economic, social, political and others form of empowerment. The study utilizes both primary and secondary data. The first question is addressed using secondary data and questions two and three with primary data. We have collected total 200 data from married rural women living at different blocks in North 24 Parganas of West Bengal. Purposive sampling techniques wasused for the study and have considered those who are the members of SHG. The findings establish that corporate social reasonability plays a major role to train women, update them, skill them and because of which women successfully attain their empowerment objectives having economic, social, political and other dimensions. The factor analysis highlighted that rural women now become a major contributors in terms of income, expenditure and decision-making process. This paper will also help the corporate sector and government to design their CSR program in a better and efficient way and will help to target more groups of women.

This paper has set itself the objective of studying the importance and the solutions proposed by these artificial intelligence tools to financial decision-making in times of crisis. To meet our objective, we proceeded with a review and schematization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address the impacts of COVID on financial markets and corporate financial decisions. In sum, regarding financial decisions perspectives, the more AI investments are amplified, the more low-cost, innovative, and effective solutions can be adopted. However, replacing managers’ knowledge and expertise is still a challenging task. For that, the management team and AI experts’ collaboration is required to soften the digital transformation, survey the market variations, and implement effective solutions.

Following the unconventional monetary policy tools of the last decade, ECB introduced a special monetary policy response to the COVID 19 pandemic, which occurred as a global challenge in early 2020. Aside from the measures aimed at providing ample liquidity, such as the targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTROs) and the pandemic emergency longer-term refinancing operations (PELTROs), collateral easing and the ongoing asset purchase programme (APP), ECB designed a special non-standard monetary policy measure, the Pandemic emergency purchase programme (PEPP). This new programme is of temporary nature and targets both private and public securities. Given the fact that some of the previous ECB’s unconventional programmes (OMT, PSPP) were challenged before the Court of Justice of the EU, one can expect the PEPP to be subject to judicial review as well. In this chapter, the author focused on the legal aspects of the PEPP. He outlined the core requirements arising from EU primary law and from the CJEU case law and considered compliance of PEPP with the EU law.

The economic scenario of the world is changing fast. People are becoming more cautious that there won’t be anything fixed for particular days. Liberalization is the buzz word and divestments and the free-market economy is what people are now talking about. The business should be based on society and as such, they have to perform minimum service to the betterment of society. Customers are god and customers are from the market. Every corporate house should perform social duties to render service to the society for their betterment and development. Indian economy being no exception, it is a definite expectation from the businesses that they will render full support to the backward areas of the country. As the economy is still on a mixed pattern, both the private and public sectors need to contribute to this. The main purpose of this article is to elaborate the laws related to CSR in India in brief and to analyze the role of CSR activities in developing brand equity for the companies. To study the sample exploratory, as well as descriptive studies, are used. The legal frameworks for corporate social responsibility prevailing in India are analyzed from secondary data where the primary data have been collected from 255 respondents on the MSME Sectors of West Bengal. The Consumer durable segment of medium enterprises have been selected as study element.

The financing of SMEs by bank credit is the subject of many concerns that have always affected credit institutions. The bank still runs this risk of default, and to cover itself, banking establishments have to apply and comply with the new prudential directives. These new credit risk management regulations were developed to avoid counterparty defaults and to ensure the stability of the entire banking system. It is within this framework of prudential regulation that the Basel Agreements were born, moving from Basel I to BaselII, BaselIII to IFRS 9, the bank will thus be able to manage its risks internally using an approach. Based on the internal rating, to prepare an internal estimate of the probability of default of its customers (occurrence of credit risk). Through this research, we will present the evolution of these prudential rules, with the evolution of credit risk, this will involve the presentation of the new rules of the Basel I agreements and the very first prudence ratio the Cook ratio. In a second step, we will present the dynamic approach to risk management, with the BaselII agreements and its second prudence ratio: the Mc Donough ratio. And finally, the last part will be devoted to the evolution of risk regulations through the transition from BASEL III rules to IFRS and in particular the treatment of IFRS9 for credit risk.

The Micro, Small, Medium Enterprises (MSME) sector has one of India’s highest employment Indexes and is the launchpad for all genres and innovators. This sector is inclusive in integrating grass root level workers into tech innovators. There are about 63 million MSMEs in India, employing 110 million individuals. According to 2019 MSME reports, the sector contributed 29% to the overall GDP catalyzing socio-economic development.

The Covid-19 pandemics have left world economies and business entities to redefine and rethink policy regulations and business models. The pandemic has created socio-economic displacement across business sectors, and no country is free from the socio-economic exclusions that has triggered. The Indian economy has been badly affected by a projection of over a seven percent decline in quarterly GDP in 2021.The coronavirus pandemic has impacted MSME earnings by 20–50 percent, with micro and small organizations being the worst hit due to liquidity crunch. According to the survey conducted by Endurance International Group, many MSMEs have temporarily shut their operations or laid off their staff due to the inability to pay salaries.

The paper focuses on the issues and challenges faced by MSMEs in India due to the pandemic. Further, an analysis of changes in MSME definition presented in the Union Budget 2021 and various policy interventions by the Government and their impact on reviving in the MSME sector is presented.

The Finnish legislature has acted quickly to enact several temporary changes to the country’s insolvency law in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. These changes are intended to protect debtors who are suffering financially from the consequences of the pandemic. There are temporary adjustments in bankruptcy legislation as well as in enforcement law. Additionally, there are temporary restrictions on the maximum interest rate and direct marketing of consumer credit. Since the beginning of 2021, the Collection Act has also temporarily contained detailed provisions on the collection costs of non-consumer receivables.

The mitigation efforts, made possible by temporary legislation, have already been used actively in the execution of enforcements. Especially applications for grace-free months and relief applications have increased. The legislature has extended the temporary validity of this ‘Covid-19 legislation’ in the different fields of insolvency law already several times.

In this article, those temporary changes are introduced and discussed in the Finnish context of insolvency law.

The Covid 19 pandemic has been serious problem in the financial market since 2020. This study aims to estimate the effect of the Covid 19 pandemic on the financial markets in the two major ASEAN economies. Employing the advanced econometrics based on copula approach, the results indicate that the probability of the nexus of the returns of total confirmed cases of covid and the stock market fluctuates together was about 5.86% for Vietnam and about 7.81% for Thailand in the period from Jan, 23th 2020 to Apr, 30th 2021. Furthermore, after at least ten days, the positive impact of Covid 19 pandemic on Vietnamese stock market and after only five days, the negative impact of Covid 19 pandemic on Thai stock market could be existed.

The COVID-19 pandemic started in Wuhan, China, and spread to almost all over the world in four months. As pandemic cases began to be detected and increased in countries, governments have started to pursue various policies such as closing the city and country borders, social distance practices, the prohibition of going out, and creating herd immunity. Especially with the closure measures implemented, the countries’ financial systems have been adversely affected, and many sectors have suffered losses. On the other hand, the provision of public services in countries has become more complex. Therefore, countries have taken several measures to maintain their public services without interruption. Legal services are one of the essential services affected by this situation. This study deals with the general, financial and legal measures that Turkey has adopted to combat against COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of the study, while the functional features that stand out in the measures are presented, some suggestions are made for a better crisis management.

The CVOID-19 Pandemic increased the hardships of millions of people all over the world and also increased the disparity between the rich and the poor with rising unemployment, loss of educational days, institutional failure, infrastructural collapse, malnourishment and malnutrition due to the stringent lockdown measures which forced numerous sections of society into the brink of poverty and destitute. The pandemic has led to multifarious problems require multi-stakeholder approach. The problem of rising criminal behaviour and the increasing crime rates coupled with the failure of the law enforcement institutions to tackle the challenges due to overload, shortage of manpower and the uniqueness of the problem has posed a serious problem to the law-and-order situation of the country. The problem becomes chronic due to the rising technical nature of crimes requiring adequately trained manpower to deal with such issues as well as the necessary dedicated infrastructural support to complement such efforts. The aspect of policy development as a base to cater and legally recognize such nature of crimes also becomes a challenge due to the pandemic induced lockdown and protocols which is crippling the law-making power of the legislatures severely. Based on qualitative approach, this paper tries to study the rising nature of crime and criminal activities in India during the COVID-19 pandemic, reasons and various probable actions and measures to be taken to solve these criminal activities.

The health emergency derived from the pandemic caused a domino effect in all aspects of human life, which has required extraordinary measures, especially at the level of laws, essential tools for the preservation of life, health and means of livelihood. According to the Scopus database, in the period January 1, 2020—June 8, 2021, more than 220,000 articles related to law have been published. Taking these data into account, a bibliometric analysis is proposed to examine the content of the publications from a word analysis to identify research topics in a set of publications, and establish consensus of relating concepts. Articles will be selected by keywords, limiting themselves to examining those that contain the following categories: “law” “legislation” and “jurisprudence”.Our hypothesis holds that the words contained in both keywords and abstracts demonstrate whether the investigation has been able to reflect the extraordinary measures adopted during the pandemic period. The results show that the diversification of the keyword occurrence networks confirms the multidisciplinary participation, 26 areas of which research predominates in fields such as medicine, public health. The keyword analysis also shows that the origin of this research is the “human” with a relevant interpretation of the right to life, to the human rights, using the law to clarify the fundamental guarantees. The analysis of the abstracts confirms the emerging research with tendencies to study the pandemic from different points of view. The number of publications in the analyzed period suggests an acceleration in the publication process, as well as some aspects attributed to open data science.

This work seeks to inquire, with the principles of rationality and equity in view, into the economic circumstances against the backdrop of which regulation of India’s banking industry has been evolving in terms of enactment of banking laws and rules broadly through the following five stages: (a) pre-independence era, (b) post-independence period till 1949, (c) From 1949 to 1970, (d) from 1970-1990, (e) 1990 onward:

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused numerous changes to our daily lives. One of these changes was our increased usage of the internet as a medium to purchase products and services or even manage our finances among others. Such overreliance caused numerous challenges to organisations and individuals alike circling around protection of information shared digitally. This is particularly evident since COVID-19 contributed to the increase in cybercrime. To facilitate their cybercrime, cybercriminals designed numerous cyber-attacks to steal sensitive information from organisations and users for financial gains.

The advent of the pandemic and remote working brought the issue of jurisdiction in relation to cross-border crime to the forefront. With most of the financial sector working from home using online solutions and several employees not working from the country of employment rather from their country of origin or from other countries, the issue of cybersecurity and cybercrime becomes a matter of prime importance. Due to the pandemic, investigations and international collaborations on cross-border crime became more delicate and, by adding the issue of applicable law and jurisdiction, the picture becomes more problematic especially since pursuing criminal activity turned into a difficult task during the pandemic.

With that in mind, the paper probes the issue of cross-border digital crime and the problem of conflict of laws applicable on cybercrime. It scrutinises the exterritoriality of laws through the territoriality principal and probes the role of the principal of jurisdiction over nationals to settle the debate about the governing law over digital financial crimes committed in cyberspace originating in another country. This is done while keeping in mind the need to establish sufficient links between the cybercrime and the applicable law.