Support for Economic Growth and Institutional Reform (SEGIR), Commercial Legal and Institutional Reform (CLIR)
IRIS Center/USAID (2004-2009)

DevTech is a member of the IRIS Center at the University of Maryland’s consortium for SEGIR/CLIR. SEGIR/CLIR provides USAID missions with technical assistance and expertise to undertake legal and institutional reform projects to eliminate barriers to economic success in developing countries. SEGIR/CLIR addresses issues of legal and institutional reform in the following areas:

  • General Commercial Legal Framework : Includes (i) legal reform of the most fundamental kind (e.g., countries undergoing substantial economic transformation, as was the case with Hungary, Russia, and Serbia), (ii) revision of national constitutions, commercial codes, and contract law, (iii) omnibus commercial law projects, and (iv) crosscutting initiatives that cannot be pinned to a specific category (e.g., information technology and e-commerce).
  • Business Environment : Efforts to address problems associated business entry and exit (company law and bankruptcy), accounting rules, corporate governance, employment laws (including labor and pension benefits) and tax laws.
  • Financial Services: Includes laws relating to business finance, capital markets, and insurance.
  • Trade & Investment : Works to improve foreign direct investment, WTO accession and compliance, customs rules, public procurement, anti-trust laws and consumer protection, competitiveness, and foreign exchange rules.
  • Commercial Dispute Resolution : Includes adjudication mechanisms for commercial disputes and enforcement mechanisms, including judicial training, court administration, docket control, arbitration, mediation, and training for bailiffs and marshals.
  • Institutional Reform : Addresses the way government bodies and their personnel, as well as other organizations (including NGOs), are organized and how they function. Institutional reform projects will generally attempt to make institutions more transparent, accountable, efficient, transparent, or effective.
  • Property Rights : Strengthens laws establishing and defining all forms of property (personal, intellectual, and real), the registration of such property, and the collateralization or mortgaging of such property.

For further information on taking advantage of this mechanism to access DevTech’s services, please contact us .