جهانی شدن و نابرابری درآمد : مفاهیم حقوق مالکیت معنوی

This paper examines the impact of globalization on income inequality for a cross-section of 62 developing countries over a period of 17 years (1985–2001). The results of the study indicate that globalization explains only 15% of the variance in income inequality. More specifically, the results show that (1) strengthening intellectual property rights and openness are positively correlated with income inequality; (2) foreign direct investment is negative and significantly correlated with income inequality but this is not robust to different model specifications; (3) the institutional infrastructure is negatively correlated with income inequality. The study's findings and the review of the literature suggest that globalization has both costs and benefits and that the opportunity for economic gains can be best realized within an environment that supports and promotes sound and credible government institutions, education and technological development.

The past two decades can be described as the era of globalization. Although there is no consensus on the definition of globalization, a common term that is synonymously with globalization is integration, in terms of people, capital, ideas, technology, and services (Houck, 2005). Empirically, globalization translates into greater mobility of the factors of production (capital and labor) and greater world integration through increased trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and enforcement of intellectual property rights [IPR] (Milanovic, 2005 and Wade, 2001). Though many studies have been done to examine the effects of trade and FDI on both economic growth and income inequality, not much has been on the effect of IPR. In the era of globalization, almost everyone is a user and a potential creator of intellectual property and therefore its protection, which is called intellectual property rights, should be of significance to policymakers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of globalization especially the harmonization of intellectual property rights (IPR) on income inequality. This is important because in the past decade the protection of IPR has moved from an arcane area of legal analysis to the forefront of global economic policymaking (Maskus, 2000a). This in no small measure has been motivated by the successful completion of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) in 1994. The TRIPS agreement set strong minimum standards in each of the areas commonly associated with IPRs, including patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets (Maskus, 2000b). To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first paper to empirically examine the impact of IPR on income inequality in developing countries. Further, we also control for regional groups to identify any differential effects of globalization (with a particular reference to IPR) in developing countries. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 offers a brief review of the literature on globalization and income inequality. Section 3 describes the data and methodology used and Section 4 presents and analyzes the results. Section 5 presents the implications, directions for future research, and offers concluding remarks.

The impact of globalization on income inequality has been generally examined in the literature with only a few focusing specifically on developing countries. Further, many of these studies have focused on two main channels of globalization, including trade and FDI. This paper contributes to the literature by examining a third and important component of the globalization process—the protection of intellectual property rights. The results of the study show that trade liberalization and strengthening of IPR have a negative effect on the distribution of income, while FDI‘s effect on income inequality is sensitive to the type of countries included in the study's sample. Even more important, the study finds that the overall country conditions in terms of the institutional infrastructure and skill level are key determinants of income inequality. These results have policy implications. First, it is important to note that though Latin American and African countries, for example, are known to have more open economies and higher IPR protection compared to Asian countries, the level of income inequality is lowest in Asia (Table 3). Further, Asian countries have been more proactive in making use of TRIPS flexibilities (UNCTAD, 2007). India, for example, has taken WTO flexibilities concerning IPR rules to refuse patents on existing medicines. Indeed, India recently won a case against Novartis, that filed a lawsuit against India challenging the constitutionality of Section 3(d) of the provision of Indian Patent Law that states that patent monopolies will be awarded for only “truly innovative medicines” rather than minor changes of existing medicines (Odell, 2007). Similarly, Thailand has established a program to help it provide cheap medicines to people with AIDS by issuing compulsory licenses on several patented medicines to ensure that they are available at more affordable prices than they would otherwise be (Action for Global Health, 2007). The WIPO (2003) report indicated that Singapore and Korea have also adopted a proactive approach to patent policy such that it promoted patent licensing, joint ventures, and strategic alliances to encourage local inventions as well as foreign direct investment. Indeed, The WTO's Doha Declaration in 2001 accepts government's rights to use compulsory licensing as a means to facilitate access to cheaper medicines through import or local production (Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, 2006). Second, though IPR protection has been recognized as part of the infrastructure supporting investments in R&D leading to innovation and subsequent economic development (Kanwar, 2006 and World Bank, 2005, and World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), 2003), it is also known that strengthening IPR has costs (Horii & Iwaisako, 2007; Maskus, 2000a). Even more critical is the argument that the current global IPR system favors the holders of intellectual property, which invariably happens to be the developed countries over the users of intellectual property that are mostly the LDCs. This is not surprising as the number of global patents originating in the 50 countries identified by the UN as LDCs has dropped from an average of 66 per year in the early 1990s to just 10 per year between 2000 and 2004 (UNCTAD, 2007). Incidentally, the US net surplus of royalties and fees increased from $14 billion in 1991 to $22 billion in 2001, while developing countries suffered a deficit of nearly $7.5 billion in 1999 alone. The discussion above is consistent with the assertion of Helpman (1993) that if anyone benefits from patent protection, it is certainly not the South. Third, the effectiveness of the IPRs system is dependent on how it impacts on innovation, market structure, and technology transfer (Naghavi, 2005), and hence the need to enhance the skill level or absorptive capacity of domestic firms in improving their productivity. This requires investment in information and communications technology, and education and job training to enhance the entrepreneurial capability of both individuals and firms in the production of goods and services to partake fully in the benefits that globalization brings. Bernanke (2007), for example, has noted that the greatest cause of inequality in the era of globalization can be attributed to the very high returns to education and consequently, policies that maximize opportunities for education and job training will help to reduce income inequality. Obviously, workers with more education and training will be better able to adapt to the fast paced changing demands in the workplace in the 21st century. Finally, globalization is not completely responsible for income inequality within and across countries. As shown in Column 1, the study's results show that the three-globalization variables explain only 15% of the variance in income inequality. This finding is consistent with the assertion of Stewart and Berry (2000) that though globalization might negatively affect the distribution of income, other country conditions, including labor laws, strength of unions and a variety of government safety net provisions might modify or accentuate the impact of globalization on income inequality. Rather, the evidence suggests that countries that have grown rapidly and improved their standard of living have not only opened up their economies for trade and FDI but have also maintained macroeconomic stability (Rodrik, 1999). The challenge for developing countries is how to reform their IPRs regime to maximize their gains, while limiting the potentially adverse effects of improved protection and to facilitate access of local entrepreneurs to the IPR system as has been done in India, Thailand, and South Korea. It has also been argued the developed and those developing countries that have achieved substantial growth rates have all fine tuned their IPRs system to match their development needs, rather than blindly implementing a wholesale IPRs policy (CIPR, 2002; Dolfsma, 2006; Kumar, 2002; Maskus, 2000a). These studies suggest that there has generally been an association with weak rather than strong forms of patent protection in the formative period of economic development and the IPRs regimes strengthened as countries became significant producers of innovations and new technology as seen in Korea and India. In discussing the findings and implications of the study, it is worth mentioning the limitations of the study. First, the time period is not long enough to make conclusive statements about the effect of globalization on income inequality. Data constraints made that impossible. Second, the changing macroeconomic and political events in the various developing countries suggest that we might not be able to capture all the factors that might influence income inequality. The limitations and the inconsistency of the other studies reviewed suggest that many more country-specific studies are needed to validate the more global studies. Further, as more consistent data on income inequality becomes available for many developing countries, it will be possible to evaluate the long-run effects of globalization on the distribution of income We conclude by asserting that globalization is neither inherently good nor bad for developing countries, as current debates seem to suggest. Instead, globalization has both costs and benefits. However, the opportunity for economic gains can be best realized within an environment that supports skilled resources, sound and credible government institutions, and technological development. Without these fundamentals, the pursuit of economic gains through trade liberalization, establishing incentives to attract FDI, and strengthening of IPR will not be achieved for developing countries. Clearly, the literature reviewed and the findings of this study call for IPR regimes norms to be fine-tuned to establish a balance between intellectual property protection and economic development of developing countries. Globalization, even though may be biased against developing countries, has created a situation in which countries with the appropriate policies might be able to succeed in bringing about economic development as is the case for most of the Asian economies.