Carsten Vogel (Weidenfeld Institute for Strategic Dialogue/Club of Three, London, United Kingdom)
Abstract
This paper discusses, from a developing country’s perspective, the impact and implications of the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights of the World Trade Organization (WTO). It does so by putting them into the context of relevant trends of globalization and assessing the political and institutional setting within the WTO framework. The paper thereby provides comprehensive background information on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPs) and the resulting international intellectual property regime, including its characteristics, preconditions, the actors and interests involved, and it provides an institutional analysis. The main finding is that the constraints on intellectual property regulation in developing countries are twofold. First, the TRIPs Agreement has an unprecedented impact on national regulations by imposing global minimum standards for types of intellectual property protection, the scope and the duration of those regulations along with rules for enforcement. Second, the emergence of the TRIPs Agreement has made intellectual property protection an important issue in today’s global production networks established by transnational corporations. Therefore, in the case of intellectual property protection, the continuous internationalization of production and the knowledge-based economy (as major trends in today’s global economy) has become the fundamental driver for increased attention to national regulation in developing countries owing to increased technological competition and investment in research and development. However, when analysing the emergence and impacts of the TRIPs Agreement, both economic and political integration appear to be deeply interlinked. Mounting exports and investment flows from the industrialized countries confronted their Governments with the demand for cross-border enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPRs). The weak and fragmented World Intellectual Property Organization system was thus bypassed by introducing the IPR issue into the talks under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which offered the best institutional platform to push intellectual property protection forward, because industrialized countries could offer rewards quid pro quo for the commitments made by developing countries. The specific characteristics of the established international intellectual property regime within the WTO framework made its global impact feasible, since WTO offers widespread membership and the option to enforce compliance through its Dispute Settlement Body. On the other hand, besides national intellectual property systems, the TRIPs Agreement also changed the global trade and investment environment fundamentally with regard to the strengthening of owner rights on inventions and innovation. As the outlined trend of internationalization of research and development indicates, the paper assumes that the TRIPs Agreement facilitates further fragmentation of production in technology-intensive sectors and hence offers further opportunities for potential host countries, because adjusted intellectual property systems and better prospects for enforcement may generally encourage transnational corporations to relocate the very intellectual property-sensitive parts of production. Throughout the paper basic theoretical concepts are discussed in order to clarify the actual developments, and illustrative examples are used, such as the internationalization of research and development and the unilateral and bilateral efforts of the United States for cross-border enforcement of IPRs.
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