Medical procedure patents worry trade agreement critics

Trade, Patents and International Technology Diffusion

This paper investigates international technology diffusion through trade and patenting in a sample of 48 countries for the period 1980 – 2000. We divide the sample in three income groups to detect different patterns of technology absorption. Our results show that rich countries benefit from domestic technology and foreign technology embodied in imported capital goods, middle-income countries en...

The Role of Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) between Iran and Malaysia their Intra industry Trade (IIT)

The North American Free Trade Agreement.

Are Patents Impeding Medical Care and Innovation?

BACKGROUND TO THE DEBATE Pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers argue that the current patent system is crucial for stimulating research and development (R&D), leading to new products that improve medical care. The financial return on their investments that is afforded by patent protection, they claim, is an incentive toward innovation and reinvestment into further R&D. But this view h...

Dynamic protection of innovations through patents and trade secrets

This paper analyzes the optimal protection strategy for an innovator of a complex innovation who faces the risk of imitation by a competitor. We suppose that the innovation can be continuously fragmented into sub-innovations. We characterize the optimal mix of patent and trade secrets when the innovator faces a strict novelty requirement and can only patent a fraction of the innovation once. We...