One size does not fit all… An economic development perspective on the asymmetric impact of Patents on R&D

Alexandre Almeida () and Aurora Teixeira ()
Additional contact information
Alexandre Almeida: Faculdade de Economia, Universidade do Porto

FEP Working Papers from Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto

Abstract: Innovation is the building block of competitive advantages and thus economic policies are increasingly focused on creating stimulus to increase a country’s innovative performance and growth potential, namely through knowledge accumulation in general and R&D in particular. In this context, current policy trend seems to support the strengthening of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), in particular, patent protection, with the argument that positive effects will emerge and would be extensive to all countries regardless their level of development. In this paper we question this “one size fits all” policy and assess how patent thicket affects knowledge productive investment taking into account countries’ development levels. Based on a panel of 95 countries over a ten-year period (1997-2006), our results show that patents have asymmetric impacts across countries development stages, evidencing pervious effects on technological leaders and positive ones on some laggards. Such evidence sustains that innovation policies be adjusted to countries development stages.

Keywords: growth models; R&D; patents; economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O32 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2008-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-knm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/08.09.18_wp292.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/08.09.18_wp292.pdf [302 Found]--> https://fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/08.09.18_wp292.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:por:fepwps:292

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FEP Working Papers from Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().