The impact of patent rights on international trade: evidence from Canada

Abstract

The extent to which Canadian manufacturing exports are sensitive to national differences in patent rights are examined. The conclusion is that, overall, Canadians tend to export more to those countries where their patent rights are highly safeguarded. Stronger patent protection induces Canadians to export relatively more to high-income countries than to low-income countries. In addition, the effect of stronger patent rights is to increase exports to those countries that pose a strong threat of imitation and to reduce exports to those countries that pose the weakest threat of imitation. JEL Classification: F13; O34 Impact de la propriété des brevets sur le commerce international : résultats pour le Canada. Ce mémoire examine jusqu'à quel point les exportations manufacturières canadiennes sont sensibles aux différences dans la propriété des brevets entre pays. L'étude conclut que les Canadiens tendent à exporter davantage vers les pays où la propriété des brevets est hautement protégée.Il appert que la plus forte protection de la propriété des brevets tend à faire que les Canadiens exportent relativement plus vers les pays à hauts revenus que vers ceux à plus faibles revenus. De plus, il appert que l'effet de la plus forte protection des brevets est d'accroître les exportations vers les pays qui posent une forte menace d'imitation et de réduire les exportations vers les pays qui posent la plus faible menace d'imitation.

Chinese Renewable Energy Technology Exports: The Role of Policy, Innovation and Markets

“…Most empirical studies focus on exports from industrialized nations to a group of developed and developing importer countries. (Maskus and Penubarti, 1995, Rafiquzzaman, 2002, Smith, 1999, 2001). In the early 2000s, studies began to focus on developing countries' trade flows and the role of IPR rights (Park and Lippoldt, 2005, Awokuse and Yin, 2010, Yang and Maskus, 2009, Branstetter et al, 2005.…”

Trade, imitative ability and intellectual property rights

“…But, as discussed above, there are reasons to believe that the relationship between IPR protection and trade is non-linear, and in particular that it may depend upon the level of development, imitative ability and the market size of the importing country. To test these hypotheses we follow the general approach of Smith (1999) and Rafiquzzaman (2002) of allocating countries into groups based on the relevant characteristic. But rather than using a predetermined allocation as they do, we employ the threshold techniques of Hansen (1996Hansen ( , 1999Hansen ( , 2000, 5 which allow us to estimate rather than impose both the number of regimes and the positioning of the splits.…”

“…Here this is explained as the average of significant market power effects in countries with the lowest levels of development and significant market expansion effects in countries with the highest levels of development. Table 3 Smith (1999) and Rafiquzzaman (2002) also examine the links between the impact of a stronger IPR regime and the importer's level of development. They do this by dividing the importing countries into groups based on income per capita and including dummy variables for each group interacted with the IPR variable.…”

“…Weak IPRs are a barrier to US exports, but only for countries that pose a strong threat of imitation. Rafiquzzaman (2002) carries out a similar analysis on Canadian manufactured exports. Market expansion effects are found for countries with the strongest threat of imitation, and some evidence of market power effects is found where the threat of imitation is weakest.…”

Intellectual property rights and U.S. information goods exports: the role of imitation threat

“…In other words, the estimated coefficients on b 8 and b 11 should be significantly negative and positive, respectively. Existing studies focusing on manufacturing exports, such as Smith (1999), Rafiquzzaman (2002), and Liu and Lin (2005), find evidence of both effects. As shown in Table 6, the estimates by adopting the IMD or WEF index as a measure of IPR protection are similar, showing a positive coefficient in all groups.…”