LEGAL ASPECTS OF FOREIGN INVESTMENT.

Edited by Wolfgang G. Friedmannand Richard C. Pugh '51. Boston: Little,Brown, 1959. 812 pp. $20.00.

Edited by Professor Friedmann of the Columbia Law School, with Richard C. Pugh '51, practicing attorney of New York City, serving as assistant editor, this fat volume is a symposium covering the legal conditions that govern foreign investment in no fewer than forty different countries, each - from Argentina to Yugoslavia - treated in a comprehensive article written by a distinguished authority, usually a native or resident of the country itself. In addition to these forty separate surveys, there is provided a chapter on "Legal Security for International Investment," a study of various factors relating to protection for the foreign investor as provided under current international law.

"The participation of the industrially developed countries in the economic progress of the underdeveloped nations is," as the editor points out in his preface, "one of the paramount international problems of our time. Its significance - not only economic, but in political terms - to the Western world has become even more marked, since the Soviet Union has entered the field as an important supplier of cheap capital loans, machinery, and engineers."

The present book has grown out of a research project at Columbia concerned with "Joint International Business Ventures," wherein it was early recognized that the complexity of legal considerations relative to investment in foreign nations was sufficiently great to require special clarification and exposition by experts.

A major part of the volume is devoted to analyses of the chief forms of business organization possible within each country for. the purposes of the foreign investor. In addition, there is extensive treatment of the national restrictions and regulations of diverse sorts imposed upon the scope and activity of foreign investment capital and the business enterprises formed by foreigners.

The final fifty pages are given over to a chapter of "Comparative Analysis" by the editor and Mr. Pugh. This presents something of a summary and synthesis of the material presented in the preceding parts. There is also a full and detailed index.

Because this area of concern is one in which the regulations and policies of the different countries are subject to change with great frequency, it is planned that supplements pointing out major alterations in this respect will be issued from time to time.