Strengthening Intellectual Property Rights Globally: Impact on India’s Pharmaceutical Exports

This paper examines the impact of stronger protection for intellectual property on the exports of a technologically imitative country such as India. The Indian experience in pharmaceutical exports can further add to the existing literature, which is otherwise largely limited to the experience of OECD countries and the USA. The empirical analysis suggests that even an imitative developing country's exports need not be negatively affected by strengthening patent regime globally, and in fact, in the case of pharmaceuticals, India stands to benefit from market expansion effects. However, this finding in the case of pharmaceutical products cannot be argued to hold for other sectors of the Indian economy, and any generalization on overall impact of stronger patent regime on aggregate exports from the Indian economy must be based on further sectoral studies.