Discrimination against Foreigners. The Wuerttemberg Patent Law in Administrative Practice

Sibylle H. Lehmann-Hasemeyer and Jochen Streb

No 7, Working Papers from German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin

Abstract: Economists stress the leading role that inclusive institutions play among the various factors that foster a country's economic growth. In this article, we show that it might be misleading to mistake the codification of a formal rule for its effective administrative implementation. As the case of the German state Wuerttemberg demonstrates, a government's lip service to the principle of equal treatment does not guarantee that the local patent authority refrains from discriminating against foreign patentees by charging comparatively high patent fees. We conclude that the introduction of a stringent and formally fair patent law alone does not guarantee that foreign inventors' intellectual property rights are protected as well as those of the domestic patentees.

JEL-codes: N13 N43 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/223188/1/SPPWP-07.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:pp1859:7

DOI: 10.18452/19469

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().