| By: |
Maskus,Keith E.;
Ridley,William Clifton |
| Abstract: |
This paper uses the World Bank database on deep trade agreements to
demonstrate the rapid increase in preferential trade agreements with standards
of intellectual property protection that are enforceable and elevated beyond
the minimums required in the World Trade Organization Trade-Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights Agreement. These accords are referred to as
intellectual property–related preferential trade agreements. The paper sets
out a treatment-control econometric approach, in which treated agreements are
defined by various characteristics and the control group is other preferential
trade agreements. This approach is used to study whether membership in
intellectual property–related preferential trade agreements affects a
country’s trade with nonmember countries. For this purpose, the paper defines
a set of industries that intensively use intellectual property rights (the
high-intellectual property group) and a set of industries that do not (the
low-intellectual property group). There is evidence that countries in these
agreements with the United States, the European Union, or the European Free
Trade Association experience significant increases in third-country aggregated
exports of biopharmaceuticals at all levels of income, while exports of
low-intellectual property goods are relatively diminished, compared with the
control preferential trade agreements. This result is reinforced using
detailed bilateral sectoral trade and holds also for exports of medical
devices from higher-income economies. Because these industries are the target
of many elevated standards in intellectual property–related preferential trade
agreements, the result suggests that these policies affect trade volumes.
Further exploratory analysis suggests that these impacts are associated with
higher local sales of affiliates of multinational firms, using US data. These
are viewed as preliminary findings that point to the need for further analysis. |
| Keywords: |
International Trade and Trade Rules,Information Technology,Intellectual Property Rights,Legal Products,Common Property Resource Development,Social Policy,Regulatory Regimes,Legal Reform,Real&Intellectual Property Law,Legislation,Judicial System Reform,Information Security&Privacy,Pharmaceuticals Industry,Pharmaceuticals&Pharmacoeconomics |
| Date: |
2021–05–12 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:9659&r= |