Intellectual Property Rights and International Trade of Agricultural Products

This paper studies the effect of strengthening intellectual property rights (IPRs) after the signing of the TRIPS on agricultural trade, for the period 1995-2011. It uses data of agricultural exports and a new yearly index of intellectual property (IP) protection, for 60 developed and developing countries. Also, the paper studies bilateral trade links and the intensive and extensive margins of trade using a gravity model. The estimates show that stronger IPRs systems affect negatively total exports and imports of agricultural products, especially for developing countries. At a more disaggregated level, we found heterogeneous results depending on the sub-sectors, but the correlation is negative for most of them.