حقوق مالکیت معنوی ، شرکت های چندملیتی و رشد اقتصادی

This paper develops a model of North–South trade with multinational firms and economic growth in order to analyze formally the effects of stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in developing countries. In the model, Northern firms invent new higher-quality products, multinational firms transfer manufacturing operations to the South and the Southern firms imitate products produced by multinational firms. It is shown that stronger IPR protection in the South (i.e., the adoption and implementation of the TRIPs agreement) leads to a permanent increase in the rate of technology transfer to the South within multinational firms, a permanent increase in R&D employment by Southern affiliates of Northern multinationals, a permanent decrease in the North–South wage gap, and a temporary increase in the Northern innovation rate.

The purpose of the present paper is to develop a model of North–South trade with multinational firms and economic growth in order to analyze formally the effects of stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in developing countries. The Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPs) agreement, which was signed as part of the Uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations in 1994, calls for the establishment of minimum standards of IPR protection by all World Trade Organization (WTO) members by 2006. The burden of policy adjustment, however, has fallen on the shoulders of developing countries because developed countries already have higher levels of IPR protection (Maskus, 2000). As a result, an intense debate has arisen about the effects of stronger IPR protection in developing countries.2 Advocates of stronger IPR protection argue that this reform promotes innovation in the global economy and benefits developing countries by fostering more rapid economic growth. They also claim that a strengthening of IPR accelerates the transfer of technology from developed countries (the North) to developing countries (the South), a further channel through which developing countries benefit. Opponents of stronger IPR protection counter that this reform leads to neither faster economic growth nor faster international technology transfer, but mainly results in the transfer of rents to multinational corporate patent holders headquartered in the world's most advanced countries especially the US.3 Recently, new evidence has become available that is directly relevant to this public policy debate. Taking advantage of considerably richer data than had been used by prior researchers, Branstetter et al. (2006) examined how technology transfer within US-based multinational firms has changed in response to a series of IPR reforms undertaken by sixteen countries over the 1982–1999 period.4 They find that royalty payments for the use of intangible assets made by affiliates to parent firms, which reflect the value of technology transfer, increase in the wake of stronger patent regimes. R&D spending by affiliates–usually viewed as a complement to technology imports from parent firms–also increases after IPR reform. The increases in affiliate royalties and R&D are concentrated among affiliates of firms that make extensive use of the US patent system prior to reforms and are therefore likely to value reforms the most. For these patent-intensive firms, there is a 34% increase in affiliate royalty payments and a 23% increase in affiliate R&D spending. Branstetter et al. (2006) conclude that improvements in IPR protection result in significant increases in technology transfer from US-based multinationals to their affiliates in reforming countries.5 This evidence represents a challenge to the existing theoretical literature on trade between the North and the South. In North–South trade models with multinational firms, stronger IPR protection in the South leads to an unambiguously lower rate of technology transfer in Glass and Saggi (2002), Sener (2006), and Glass and Wu (2007), the exact opposite of what Branstetter et al. (2006) find empirically.6 The observed increase in the rate of technology transfer that results from stronger IPR protection is consistent with the implications of North–South trade models developed by Helpman (1993), Lai (1998), and Branstetter et al. (2007). However these papers all assume that international technology transfer within multinational firms is costless and thus cannot account for the observed increase in R&D spending by foreign affiliates of US multinationals. In these papers there is no R&D spending by affiliates, while several empirical studies have documented that R&D conducted by affiliates in developing countries is focused on the absorption of parent-firm technology and on its modification for local markets (Kuemmerle, 1999). In this paper, we present a dynamic general equilibrium North–South trade model that is consistent with the above-mentioned empirical evidence. In the model, Northern firms engage in innovative R&D to develop new higher-quality products and once successful, they engage in adaptive R&D to learn how to transfer their manufacturing production from the high-wage North to the low-wage South. The profit flows earned by firms jump up when they are successful in transferring their production to the South and each production transfer is associated with a royalty payment from the foreign affiliate to its parent for the use of the parent firm's technology. When firms are successful in transferring their production to the South, they also become exposed to a positive rate of imitation by Southern firms. Stronger IPR protection in the South is modeled as a reduction in the rate at which Southern firms imitate the products that North-based multinational firms produce in the South. The model has unique steady-state equilibrium with a constant rate of innovation and a constant rate of technology transfer in each industry. The steady-state rate of innovation does not depend on the scale of the economy and thus this model is not subject to the Jones (1995a) critique of early endogenous growth models.7 Scale effects are ruled out by assuming that innovating becomes more difficult as products improve in quality and become more complex, as in Segerstrom (1998) and Li (2003).8 Consequently, economic growth is semi-endogenous (policy choices do not affect the long-run economic growth rate) and because of this property, the model is particularly tractable. We find that stronger IPR protection in the South (i.e., the adoption and implementation of the TRIPs agreement) leads to a permanent increase in the rate of technology transfer to the South within multinational firms and a permanent increase in adaptive R&D spending in the South by multinational firms. These two effects are connected because the increase in adaptive R&D spending is what drives the increase in the rate of technology transfer within multinational firms. Thus the model is consistent with the two main empirical findings in Branstetter et al., 2006 and Branstetter et al., 2007, that patent reform is associated with increased royalty payments from foreign affiliates to their parent firms in the North and increased R&D spending by these foreign affiliates. Furthermore, we find that stronger IPR protection in the South leads to a temporary increase in the Northern innovation rate and a permanent decrease in the North–South wage gap. Thus this paper provides support for the argument that patent reform in developing countries promotes innovation in the global economy and also sheds light on why several developing countries have been growing faster than typical developed countries. Along the transition path leading to a new steady-state equilibrium with stronger IPR protection, the North–South wage gap can only permanently decrease if real wages grow faster in the South than in the North. In addition to analyzing the equilibrium effects of stronger IPR protection, we also study the long-run welfare effects. In North–South trade models where patent reform permanently increases the economic growth rate (i.e., Lai, L, 1998, Branstetter et al., 2007 and Glass and Wu, , 2007), consumers must eventually be better off than they would have been without patent reform. Likewise, in North–South trade models where patent reform permanently decreases the economic growth rate (i.e., Glass and Saggi, , 2002 and Sener, 2006), consumers must eventually be worse off. In our model, by contrast, the long-run welfare effects are not unambiguous because patent reform does not permanently change the economic growth rate (growth is semi-endogenous). However, most of the long-run effects go in the direction of benefiting Southern consumers. When IPR protection is strengthened in the South, Southern consumers benefit from the faster rate of innovation, the faster rate of technology transfer, and the decrease in the North–South wage gap. The only consideration that goes against Southern consumers is that stronger IPR protection leads to less manufacturing production being transferred within the South from multinational firms with higher prices to Southern firms with lower prices. Thus this paper yields a generally optimistic picture concerning the long-run welfare effects of stronger IPR protection in developing countries. In recent decades, structural changes in the global economy have significantly increased the effective size of the South. China's entry into the world trading system has augmented the Southern labor force by 760 million workers, the collapse of communism has added 260 million workers, and recently India has added another 440 million workers (Venables, 2006). As a final exercise, we explore the effects of increasing the initial size of the South and compare these effects with the corresponding effects of patent reform. We find that increasing the initial size of the South has almost the same steady-state equilibrium effects: there is a permanent increase in the rate of technology transfer to the South within multinational firms, a permanent increase in adaptive R&D spending in the South by multinational firms, and a temporary increase in the Northern innovation rate. The only difference is that Southern market expansion has no effect on the North–South wage gap, whereas patent reform reduces the North–South wage gap. An increase in the initial size of the South unambiguously increases long-run Southern consumer welfare. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 offers an overview of the related literature. The model is presented in Section 3 and then solved for the unique steady-state equilibrium in Section 4. The equilibrium effects of stronger IPR protection are derived in Section 5 and the corresponding long-run welfare effects are derived in Section 6. Section 7 offers some concluding remarks and avenues for further research. Some algebraic derivations are relegated to Appendix A and the effects of Southern market expansion are contained in Appendix B.

In this paper, we have developed a model of North–South product-cycle trade where multinational firms play a central role. Higher-quality products are discovered in the high-wage North through stochastic and sequential R&D races, and the winners of these innovative R&D races then engage in adaptive R&D in order to transfer their manufacturing operations to the low-wage South. Once firms have succeeded in transferring their manufacturing operations to the South, they face a risk that their technology will be copied by Southern firms and their profits will vanish. The model generates semi-endogenous growth because we assume that innovating becomes more difficult as products improve in quality and become more complex. Therefore, the model is not subject to the Jones (1995a) critique of early endogenous growth models. The main focus of the paper is on analyzing the steady-state equilibrium effects of stronger intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. We find that stronger IPR protection in the South increases permanently the rate of international technology transfer within multinational firms and generates a temporary increase in the Northern innovation rate. In addition, stronger IPR protection reduces permanently the North–South wage gap. The steady-state equilibrium effects of stronger IPR protection are consistent with the empirical findings of Branstetter et al. (2006) on technology transfer within multinational firms and the evidence in Jones (1997) and Sala-i-Martin (2006) on the decline in global income inequality. Encouraged by these results, we also analyze the long-run welfare effects of stronger IPR protection. We find that stronger IPR protection in the South contributes to benefiting Southern consumers in the long run by increasing temporarily the rate of innovation, by increasing permanently the rate of technology transfer within multinational firms, and by increasing permanently the relative wage of Southern workers. The only channel through which stronger IPR protection in the South hurts Southern consumers is that less manufacturing production is transferred within the South from higher-priced foreign affiliates to lower-priced Southern firms. Overall, this paper supports a rather positive assessment concerning the long-run effects of stronger IPR protection in developing countries, in contrast to several previous theoretical studies. For example, Glass and Saggi (2002), Sener (2006), and Glass and Wu (2007) all find that stronger IPR protection in the South leads to a lower rate of international technology transfer within multinational firms. The analysis could be extended in several dimensions. For instance, the effects of commercial policies and trade costs could be incorporated into the present model, and the assumption that only the North can innovate could be relaxed. In addition, finite patents and patent enforcement policies could be modeled following the lead of Grossman and Lai (2004). These important issues represent interesting directions for further research.