How do Intellectual property law regimes within the EU affect innovation activity?

• This paper examines the relationship between patent law regimes and innovation activity. We use an index of patent strength developed by Ginarte & Park (1997) and regress this against two proxies for innovation activity: patent applications and patent grants. We control for legal origin, and conduct partial analyses for EU and non-EU countries. We find that the patent strength has an inversed U-shaped relation with innovation activity. We observe that this inversed U-shaped relation is stronger for abroad patent applications than domestic innovation activity. We observe the opposite effect within the EU countries sample. The relation between the patent strength and the innovation activity is U-shaped. We observe also that this relation is driven by the abroad patent applications. Our conclusions are that patent regimes seem to be more effectual on attracting abroad innovations and that integration, common agreement and strong patent law within the EU countries induce innovators to apply for abroad patents. We obtain similar results in our robustness analyses when we use patent grants as proxy for the innovation activity and re-run our regressions.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Patent rights

innovation activity

abroad patent applications

EU.

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)