Acceso usuarios
Despite attempts to harmonize intellectual property rights (IPR) across countries, significant inter-country diversity exists in their “strength.” Our paper situates the literature on IPR in the broader literature on institutions to gain insights into the way economic performance, and historical political contingencies shape IPR, and put these hypotheses to empirical scrutiny using cross-country regression analysis. Such analyses are often criticized for treating institutions as exogenous variables. We develop a simultaneous equation model to address these concerns. We find that political treatise, institutional complementarities, and historical processes all shape strength of IPR in a country. However, strengthening IPR, while augmenting income, does not seem to favour the cause of human development.
