IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ulb/ulbeco/2013-301517.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Enhancing judicial efficiency to foster economic activity in Portugal

Author

Listed:
  • Sofia Amaral-Garcia
  • Yosuke Jin

Abstract

A well-functioning justice system is indispensable to business activity and to a society as a whole.Judicial efficiency measured by trial length, one of the essential factors in the effectiveness of thejustice system, ensures contract enforcement, which is the basis of market transactions. Judicialefficiency is closely associated with accessibility to judicial services and the certainty of judicialdecisions, raising people’s confidence. Portugal has undertaken numerous judicial reforms in thepast, to the extent that it is difficult to disentangle and evaluate fully the effects of each reform.Overall, judicial efficiency remains weak, as reflected in the average trial length and bottlenecks ina number of courts. The data collection system, significantly developed as part of the reforms, canbe more fully utilised for allocating court resources. The autonomy of the judicial council and courtpresidents can also be strengthened so that they can effectively manage resources. Individual judgescan be better incentivised through performance-oriented evaluation. Competition in the legalprofession sector can be enhanced while increasing the transparency of legal services. Also,alternative dispute resolution mechanisms can be developed further, meeting different needs forjudicial services, in particular those on insolvency, while alleviating court congestion. Finally,building on past and ongoing reform efforts, the judicial system should continue to improve thecapacity to undertake forensic investigations of economic and financial crimes.

Suggested Citation

  • Sofia Amaral-Garcia & Yosuke Jin, 2019. "Enhancing judicial efficiency to foster economic activity in Portugal," ULB Institutional Repository 2013/301517, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
  • Handle: RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/301517
    Note: Sponsorship: OECD ; 1567
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Judicial efficiency; trial length; allocation of court resources; governance in the court system; workload assessment; regulation in the legal service sector; alternative dispute resolution mechanisms;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
    • K23 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Regulated Industries and Administrative Law
    • K40 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - General
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/301517. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Benoit Pauwels (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ecsulbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.