The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Treaties

By Suzanne Scotchmer. 2001

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intellectual property treaties have two main types of provisions: national treatment of foreign inventors, and harmonization of protections. I characterize the circumstances in which countries would want to treat foreign inventors the same as national inventors. I then argue that national treatment of foreign inventors leads to stronger intellectual property protection than is optimal, and that this effect is exacerbated when protections must be harmonized. However levels of public and private R&D spending will be lower than if each country took account of the uncompensated externalities that its R&D spending confers on other countries. The stronger protection engendered by attempts at harmonization are a partial remedy.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/288266124d0cf4bfa52a7186325aa9c6dc81c0d7

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Management of Technology and Innovation

Bronwyn H Hall

Citations in the corpus

The role of patent protection in (clean/green) technology transfer (2010, unknown): “ Scotchmer, S. (2004).”
Is the WTO Passé (2015, unknown): “Recent work adopting TRIPS as the focus includes Maskus (2000), Grossman and Lai (2004), Scotchmer (2004) and Geng and Saggi (2014).”
Patents and patent policy (2007, methodology): “Using a similar setup, Scotchmer (2004) shows that harmonization generally strengthens IP protection in all countries, and that because there are no similar institutions to manage the benefits of public support for innovation, the tendency is towards too much protection and too little public…”