Enforcing Intellectual Property Rights: Estimating the Optimal Level of Enforcing Patent Protection

Intellectual property rights give innovators, both individuals and firms, the right to control and derive benefits from writing (copyright), inventions (patents), processes (trade secrets) and identifiers (trademarks) (definition provided by American Friends Service Committee). IPRs are important to growth of an economy because they allow for an increase in incentives for parties to pursue new forms of innovation. IPRs are important because they have the ability to affect the stock of intellectual knowledge in a country. However, IPRs are dependent on the ability and/or willingness of a country to enforce them. It is possible that the benefits of enforcing IPRs do not always outweigh the costs. Consequently, a country may change its enforcement level in order to implement its specific policy.