PLANT VARIETIES, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND INNOVATION IN UK AGRICULTURE

Chittur Srinivasan and Benjamin Crost

No 7987, 81st Annual Conference, April 2-4, 2007, Reading University, UK from Agricultural Economics Society

Abstract: Starting with a brief overview of trends in plant variety protection (PVP) in the UK since inception of PVP legislation, this paper assesses the strength of incentives for innovation provided by the PVP regime. We modify and extend models from the patent literature that attempt to infer the private value of innovations from the behaviour of titleholders in relation to the annual renewal of protection. Our results suggest that the average private return to protection from new wheat varieties is fairly modest and that the distribution of these returns is highly skewed. This implies that a large proportion of PVP certificates have very little economic value. The move towards stronger forms of protection for plant variety innovations and the (successful) clamour from the industry for imposition of royalties on farm-saved seed of protected varieties can be understood as a response to the declining returns from variety innovations in agricultural crops brought about by increasing competition and accelerated turnover of varieties. Anecdotal evidence regarding the declining viability of conventional plant breeding for agricultural crops in the UK is also supported by our results.

Keywords: Research; and; Development/Tech; Change/Emerging; Technologies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25
Date: 2007
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ino, nep-ipr and nep-pr~
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/7987/files/cp07sr01.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:ags:aes007:7987

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.7987

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 81st Annual Conference, April 2-4, 2007, Reading University, UK from Agricultural Economics Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().