CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Dagnaw, Getahun Walelgn |
|---|---|
| Title | Individual Bankruptcy Law for Ethiopia: Lessons from United States and Germany |
| Summary | After deregulation of consumer credit and resultant availability, over-indebtedness became a problem for many countries. As a response to this many jurisdictions have departed from their “merchant oriented” bankruptcy law to include individuals giving them discharge and fresh start. Germany, United States, United Kingdom and France are some of the countries that adopted consumer bankruptcy laws after experiencing over-indebtedness problem. There are also several other reasons for using individual bankruptcy discharge and fresh start as an important policy tool. Accordingly, individual bankruptcy law, with discharge and fresh start, is justified out of entrepreneurship policy, development policy, social insurance function, debtor rehabilitation and reintegration and human act of forgiveness. These factors also determine the scope of one’s individual bankruptcy law. The German and United States individual bankruptcy laws confirm this fact. In Ethiopia credit market is still highly regulated; nevertheless consumers have access to credit and are potentially exposed to risk of indebtedness and there is a move towards that. Adopting individual bankruptcy law can also be an ex ante solution. More importantly, introducing such law to Ethiopia is more convincing based on the entrepreneurship, social insurance, development policy and rehabilitative function of discharge and fresh start. It is, therefore, my thesis that Ethiopia also should follow the global trend by adopting individual bankruptcy with adequate discharge and fresh start. This law should be based on German model, repayment plan and then discharge. The discharge should be subjected to payment of certain portion of debt and the debtors should cover cost of proceeding. This will reduce the burden of financing the system. |
| Supervisor | Prof. Tibor Tajti |
| Department | Legal Studies LLM |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/dagnaw_getahun.pdf |
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