Distance to frontier, intellectual property rights, and economic growth

Haibin Wu

Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 2010, vol. 19, issue 2, 165-183

Abstract: This article examines the effects of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on growth and convergence. Firms in a country undertake both innovation and imitation to improve their productivity. IPR protection reduces the cost of innovation, but makes imitation more costly. Countries at early stages of growth adopt a strategy of high effort on imitation, and switch to the strategy of high effort on innovation at some point. A higher degree of IPR protection makes the switch to the strategy of high effort on innovation earlier. There are two possible growth traps. A middle-income trap arises when a country fails to switch to high effort on innovation due to a low degree of IPR protection. Whereas a poverty trap may exist at the early stage of development, when there is no enough effort on imitation due to a strict IPR protection.

Keywords: innovation; imitation; intellectual property rights; convergence; traps (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10438590802551227 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:ecinnt:v:19:y:2010:i:2:p:165-183

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GEIN20

DOI: 10.1080/10438590802551227

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Innovation and New Technology is currently edited by Professor Cristiano Antonelli

More articles in Economics of Innovation and New Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().