2013/23 | LEM Working Paper Series | ||||||||||||||||
The Role of Intellectual Property Rights in the Development Process, with Some Lessons from Developed Countries: An Introduction |
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Giovanni Dosi, Joseph Stiglitz |
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Keywords | |||||||||||||||||
Intellectual Property Rights, Knowledge Accumulation, Innovation, Imitation, Development
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Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
The paper - which will introduce the book Intellectual Property Rights: Legal and Economic
Challenges for Development, edited by M. Cimoli, G. Dosi, K. Maskus, R. Okediji, J. Reichman
and J. Stiglitz, Oxford University Press, forthcoming - discusses the role of Intellectual Property
Rights (IPR) in the process of development, both from the point of view of the theory and on the
grounds of the historical record of nowadays developed and emergent economies.
In developed countries, the tightening of the breadth and width of IPR over the last thirty
years or so did not seem to display any positive effect on the rates of innovation. Indeed, there is
circumstantial evidence to the opposite. And, indeed, a sound theoretic consideration of the nature
of technological knowledge and the drivers of its accumulation fully reveals the limitation, possible
even the perverse effects, of IPRs.
All this is only reinforced in the case of catching-up countries, with respect to which both
theory and historical experience suggest that loose and limited IPR are most conducive to
knowledge accumulation and technological imitation and absorption.
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