Intellectual Property Rights: Legal and Economic Challenges for Development

In recent years, Intellectual Property Rights - both in the form of patents and copyrights - have expanded in their coverage, the breadth and depth of protection, and the tightness of their enforcement. Moreover, for the first time in history, the IPR regime has become increasingly uniform at international level by means of the TRIPS agreement, irrespectively of the degrees of development of the various countries.

This volume, first, addresses from different angles the effects of IPR on the processes of innovation and innovation diffusion in general, and with respect to developing countries in particular. Contrary to a widespread view, there is very little evidence that the rates of innovation increase with the tightness of IPR even in developed countries. Conversely, in many circumstances, tight IPR represents an obstacle to imitation and innovation diffusion in developing countries.

What can policies do then? This is the second major theme of the book which offers several detailed discussions of possible policy measures even within the current TRIPS regime - including the exploitation of the waivers to IPR enforcement that it contains, various forms of development of 'technological commons', and non-patent rewards to innovators, such as prizes. Some drawbacks of the regimes, however, are unavoidable: hence the advocacy in many contributions to the book of deep reforms of the system in both developed and developing countries, including the non-patentability of scientific discoveries, the reduction of the depth and breadth of IPR patents, and the variability of the degrees of IPR protection according to the levels of a country's development.

Mario Cimoli is the Director of the Division of Production, Productivity and Management at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). He obtained his PhD at the SPRU, University of Sussex (1992), with a thesis that analysed the effect of technological gaps and trade on growth in developing economies. Since 1992 he has served as a Professor of Economics at the University of Venice (Ca'Foscari). In 2004 he was appointed co-director (with Giovanni Dosi and Joseph Stiglitz) of two task forces: Industrial Policy and Intellectual Property Rights Regimes for Development (Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University, New York). He was also awarded the Philip Morris Chair of International Business (2004) at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, University of Pisa.


Giovanni Dosi is Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute of Economics at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa. He is also Co-Director of the task forces Industrial Policy and Intellectual Property Rights, for the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University and Continental European Editor of Industrial and Corporate Change. His research areas include economics of innovation and technological change, industrial economics, evolutionary theory, economic growth and development, and organizational studies.

Keith E. Maskus is Professor of Economics and Associate Dean for Social Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has been a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank. He is also a Research Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Fellow at the Kiel Institute for World Economics, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide. He serves also as a consultant for the World Bank and the World Intellectual Property Organization and is currently chairing a panel of the National Academy of Sciences on intellectual property management in standards-setting organizations. Professor Maskus writes extensively about various aspects of international trade. His research focuses on the international economic aspects of protecting intellectual property rights. He is the author of Private Rights and Public Problems: The Global Economics of Intellectual Property in the 21st Century (2012, Peterson Institute for International Economics).


Ruth L. Okediji is the William L. Prosser Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. She has written, lectured, and published extensively on a range of issues in international copyright law and policy, with an emphasis on the role of intellectual property in economic growth and development. Her recent work has examined challenges to the international intellectual property system in the context of multilateral trade policy, scientific research, indigenous innovation systems, and new technologies. She has worked with numerous international and inter-governmental organizations including the United Nations Development Program's (UNDP) flagship project on Innovation, Culture, Biogenetic Resources, and Traditional Knowledge; the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)-ICTSD Capacity Building Project on Intellectual Property Rights and Sustainable Development; and as an Advisor to various governments on compliance with intellectual property treaties.

Jerome H. Reichman is Bunyan S. Womble Professor of Law at Duke Law School. He has written and lectured widely on diverse aspects of intellectual property law, including comparative and international intellectual property law and the connections between intellectual property and international trade law. His articles in this area have particularly addressed the problems that developing countries face in implementing the World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). On this and related themes, he and Keith Maskus have recently published a book entitled International Public Goods and Transfer of Technology Under a Globalized Intellectual Property Regime (2005, Cambridge University Press).