Abstract
Learning a lesson from the impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“SOX”) on the U.S. cross-listing market, this article takes the phenomenon that Taiwanese firms listed shares overseas as another case study to further examine how law market demand and supply forces interplay under international jurisdictional competition. After drawing an implication from the SOX story that law market forces underlying jurisdictional competition would constrain a regulating jurisdiction from disregarding business demands and from imposing costly regulation, this article applies this to prove the positive thesis that in the Taiwan case the output of these market interactions underlying international jurisdictional competition among global legal centers is that Taiwan’s costly regulation on outward investment in Mainland China is substantially liberalized especially in 2008. Notably this article is purely describing that law market forces underlying international jurisdictional competition are already working and that competitive incentives drive local policies. The failure of economic regulations with extra-territorial reach may come again if Taiwan’s government fails adequately to recognize and deal with the competitive dynamics in a global setting.