Has the Least developed countries' TRIPS Waiver Delivered on its Promise of Creating a Viable Technological Base?

Sèna Kimm Gnangnon

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: The Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) Agreement of the World Trade Organization has granted major flexibilities to least developed countries (LDCs). One of these flexibilities is the exemption from the implementation of the majority of the provisions of this Agreement over a certain period (referred to as "TRIPS Waiver"), so as to help LDCs create a viable technological base. The present article has investigated whether the TRIPS Waiver was instrumental in expanding LDCs' technological base measured by their total factor productivity level. The analysis has used 14 LDCs (based on available data) and two different control groups, over the period from 1981 to 2020. It has revealed that the TRIPS Waiver helped LDCs expand their technological base, in particular for LDCs that had very weak technological bases. In addition, this positive technological base effect of the TRIPS Waiver was larger in LDCs that implemented weaker intellectual property laws, as well as those that endeavour to relatively diversify their export products, and improve the quality of export products in a context of a greater export product diversification.

Keywords: Least developed countries; TRIPS Waiver; World Trade Organization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-ipr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/275666/1/TRIPS-Waiver-Productivity.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:275666

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().