Intellectual property rights protection in the presence of exhaustible resources

Takeo Hori () and Hiroaki Yamagami
Additional contact information
Takeo Hori: Tokyo Institute of Technology

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, 2018, vol. 20, issue 4, No 3, 759-784

Abstract: Abstract We study the role of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in the presence of exhaustible resources. Because resource scarcity is a constraint on growth, one may conjecture that IPR protection should be strong to stimulate research and development activities and to sustain perpetual growth. However, we show that IPR protection does not always need to be strengthened as the economy becomes more resource intensive. Furthermore, we derive the welfare-maximizing strength of IPR protection, and show that it increases in the presence of exhaustible resources. Therefore, our results suggest that ignoring exhaustible resources may result in inefficient innovation policies.

Keywords: Endogenous growth; Exhaustible resource; Innovation; Intellectual property rights protection; Patent breadth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 Q3 (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)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10018-018-0214-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Intellectual property rights protection in the presence of exhaustible resources (2014)
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:spr:envpol:v:20:y:2018:i:4:d:10.1007_s10018-018-0214-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... mental/journal/10018

DOI: 10.1007/s10018-018-0214-0

Access Statistics for this article

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies is currently edited by Ken-Ichi Akao

More articles in Environmental Economics and Policy Studies from Springer, Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - SEEPS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().