Economists view intellectual property rights (IPRs) as policy tools for encouraging innovation. There are many types of IPRs and of institutions concerned with their administration. We begin by outlining how these complex and varied rights are supposed to work and how they interact with other...

The UK`s business R&D (BERD) to GDP ratio is low compared to other leading economies, and the ratio has slowly declined over the 1990s. This paper uses data on large UK firms to analyse the link between R&D and productivity over the 1989-2000 period. Using a production function approach, and a...

This paper investigates empirically the importance of technological catch-up in explaining productivity growth in a sample of countries since the 1960s. New proxies for a country's absorptive capability--based on data for students studying abroad, telecommunications and publications--are tested...

This paper examines the efficiency of public sector expenditures and foreign aid at achieving social sector outcomes in Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Efficiency is estimated using a Stochastic Production Function (SPF) approach and panel data since 1990. A second stage of the analysis...

The copyright industries—such as music, film, software and publishing—occupy a significant and growing share of economic activity. Current copyright law protects the creator for up to 70 years after their death, significantly longer than patent protection (20 years after...

Recent investigations into cross-country convergence follow Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) in using a log-linear approximation to the Swan-Solow growth model to specify regressions. These studies tend to assume a common and exogenous technology. In contrast, the technology catch-up literature...