Intellectual Property Rights, Development, and Catch-Up

Abstract

Abstract Economic development involves a process of catching up with leading countries at the time. Catch‐up is never achieved by investment in physical assets alone: also needed are the learning of modern technologies and accumulation of a country's own technological capabilities. Nevertheless, most literature on economic development has paid scant attention to this technological aspect of catch‐up or at best assumed that developing countries can simply take advantage of the backlog of technologies practiced in advanced countries. Despite this assumption catch‐up can only occur with significant efforts and capacity. Moreover, the speed of catch‐up depends not just on the technological distance from the leaders but also on the country's social capability and legal, economic, and scientific institutions. One such institution is the regime of intellectual property rights (IPR), particularly patents. Patents may promote innovation and technology transfer. Yet they may prove to be barriers for developing countries that intend to acquire technologies through imitation and reverse‐engineering. Therefore, the current move to harmonize the IPR system internationally, such as the TRIPS agreement, may have unexpected consequences on developing countries. This book explores this issue through an in‐depth study of ten countries and one region, ranging from early developing countries (USA, Nordic countries, and Japan) and post‐World War II developing countries (Korea, Taiwan, and Israel) to more recent developing countries (Argentine, Brazil, China, India, and Thailand). These studies clearly indicate that the impact of IPR is complex and significantly varies across industries and across development stages.

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