In the name of TRIPS: the impact of regulatory changes on patent activity by residents and non-residents in Latin America

PRESENTA: Valeria Arza (CONICET; CENIT-EEyN-UNSAM) // COMENTA: Sergio Petralia (Utrech University)

ABSTRACT

We analyse the effect of country-specific regulatory changes inspired on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) on patenting activities in Latin America (LA) TRIPS constitutes a major milestone in terms of international harmonisation of intellectual property rights (IPR). Harmonisation means, in practice, that developing countries make their regulation on IPR more stringent. By analysing national legislation on IPR for 44 countries, we built exogenously a variable that captures when each country hosts “the spirit of TRIPS”. This allows us to assess the impact of paradigmatic TRIPS requirements on patenting activities. We follow two goals: i) to assess whether such impact was different in LA than in developed countries; ii) to analyse the difference in how residents and non-residents reacted to changes in regulations in LA. Our results support the hypothesis that more rigid regulations on IPR pushed forward by TRIPS in LA had a positive impact on patenting, but only on non-residents, while patenting by residents was negatively affected by those changes.

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