Are IPRs institutions meant to foster innovative activities or conversely to secure appropriation and profitability? Taking stock of a long-term empirical evidence on the pharmaceutical sector in the US, we can hardly support IPRs intended as an innovation rewarding institution. According to our...

This paper evaluates the effects of patent protection on pharmaceutical innovations for twenty-six countries that established pharmaceutical patent laws during 1978-2002. Controlling for country characteristics through matched sampling techniques to establish two proper comparison sets among...

This paper examines the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic innovation based on a data set covering the pharmaceutical industries across 29 provinces in the People's Republic of China (PRC) over the period 1998-2007. We show that there is a negative horizontal spillover effect...

In the decade since the Doha Declaration was adopted, significant progress has been made in addressing problems associated with innovation and access to medicines, including through expanded financial support for procurement and distribution of treatments and vaccines and the establishment of...

One of the explicit goals of the 1995 TRIPS Agreement is promotion of technological innovation and transfer and dissemination of technologies worldwide. We statistically assess the relative impact of TRIPS on technology diffusion in the life sciences sector, using a longitudinal panel dataset...

Recent years have seen a remarkable increase in patents in the field of information, communication and entertainment (ICE) technology and biotechnology. The growth of patents in those areas has triggered serious concern about access to ICE and genome related inventions, as the rise of patents...

The present paper explores the multi-layered relationship between plant patents, the right to food and competition law. The present contribution takes the view that the growing tendency to appropriate agricultural crops through intellectual property (IP) – thereby making a pivotal shift from...

In the delicate interaction between intellectual property and public interest, two antinomian questions come to the fore. The first question is to what extent patent law guarantees public interest, contributes to public interest or, on the contrary, limits public interest. The second question is...

International Business is understood as commercial activity which transcends borders. In the era of Globalization, the distinction between domestic business and international business has become insignificant. Most of the domestic firms go international due to some ‘proactive/reactive' factors...