1. Basedow, ‘The Communitarization of the Conflict of Laws under the Treaty of Amsterdam’, 37 CMLRev. (2000) p. 687.
2. The article is partly based on Lombardo, Regulatory Competition in Company Law in the European Community. Prerequisites and Limits (Frankfurt am Main 2002). The terms company (law) and corporation (law) are used as perfect synonyms. This article takes Germany as the European jurisdiction of major reference.
3. On a comparative policy dimension, see Easterbrook, ‘Federalism and European Business Law’, 14 Int. Rev. L. & Econ. (1994) p. 125.
4. In 1999, the GDP of the United States amounted to US$9,152,098 million. In the same year, the European Union had a GDP of US$8,390,233 million. World Bank, World Development Indicators (Washington DC, World Bank 2001) p. 198. Considering that the population of the United States is about 280 million and that of the European Union about 380 million, the GDP per capita in 1999 was about US$32,000 for the United States and US$22,000 in the European Union.
5. The economics of conflict of law rules is a relatively new development in law and economics. For an initial attempt to approach European conflict of law issues from this perspective, see Mankowski, ‘Europäisches Internationales Privat- und Prozessrecht im Lichte der Ökonomischen Analyse’, in Ott and Schäfer, eds., Vereinheitlichung und Diversität des Zivilrechts in transnationalen Wirtschafträumen (Tübingen 2002) p. 118.