The Trips Agreement From The Perspective Of Developing Countries

Abstract Economic development requires enhanced use of knowledge and the ability to create knowledge in all area such as scientific and business. In modern economy, knowledge is at least as important an input as factor of production like labour, capital, and raw materials. Globalization has created productivity and competitiveness results becoming a function of knowledge creation and information processing. Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have got important effects on innovation and technology transfer for countries. The World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement has reformed intellectual property rights throughout the world. Following the growth of international trade and the spread of advanced technology, considerable progress has been made in IPRs. As a result, there is the need to protect intellectual property in the global level. Since it was signed in 1994, the TRIPS Agreement has led the trend toward the global harmonization of IPRs protection. The benefists of globalization on knowledge economies is not distributed equivalently between developed countries and developing countries. For this reason, the effects of the TRIPS Agreement on IPRs protection vary according to the degree of economic development of countries. The protection of IPRs is novel case for most developing countries. There are many studies on the intellectual property rights in the literature. However, none of these studies has focused in detail on the results of the TRIPS Agreement for countries which have the different development level. In this paper, we investigate whether the economic costs and benefits from stronger IPRs differ in developed and developing countries.

Keywords

TRIPS, Intellectual Property Rights, Knowledge Economy.