They said of the July 1997 Asian regional financial crisis that ‘…it could never happen again’. They were right. There has not been another regional crisis—just an international one! This paper owes its origins to the Asian financial crisis. The crisis sparked the development of an assessment model for the evaluation of insolvency laws. The paper reviews the considerable developments in this area, commencing with the pioneering work of the Asian Development Bank in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and culminating in the, now, quite established triennial practice of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in its assessment of the insolvency laws of its ‘countries of operation’. Along the way, mention is also made of the development and application of the World Bank ‘Principles’ and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law Legislative Guide for Insolvency Law. All of these diagnostic tools have been variously employed in an endeavour to provide a fair and acceptable basis for evaluating an insolvency law. The paper draws comparisons from these tools and concludes that there is a considerable degree of correlation between them, such that approaches taken in 1998 have remained much the same to this time. The EBRD assessment programme is singled out for fuller analysis. It was developed with the benefit of the earlier assessment models and is consistently used as a means of tracking the development of insolvency laws. Accordingly, the paper presents the survey questionnaire on which the EBRD assessment is based, explains the methodology behind it and presents the results of the last of such assessments (2009). It invites an examination of the bases on which the EBRD assessments are undertaken and whether the approach is sufficiently broad, objective and fair and its use in possibly creating aspirations for reform. One purpose of the paper is to capture and record the historical origins and development of the assessment models before it all becomes lost in the passage of time. The paper also advances the use of the EBRD assessment model as a teaching tool in courses in comparative and international insolvency law. Copyright © 2014 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd