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

ARZA, VALERIA; LÓPEZ, ANDRÉS; PASCUINI, PAULO

Pisa

Seminario; Seminario del Departamento de Economía y Gestión de la Universidad de Pisa; 2020

Remarc, Universidad de Pisa

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. TRIPS is an international agreement put forward by the World Trade Organisation that 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. We analyse national legislation on IPR of 45 countries to identify when they became aligned to most important requirements put forward by TRIPS. Thus, we built, exogenously, a variable that captures when each country host ?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 Latin America than in developed countries; ii) to analyse whether there was a difference in how residents and non-residents in Latin America reacted to changes in regulations. Our results support the hypothesis that non-residents in Latin America benefited the most from more rigid regulations on IPR pushed forward by TRIPS