Intellectual property rights : legal and economic challenges for development / edited by Mario Cimoli, Giovanni Dosi, Keith E. Maskus, Ruth L. Okediji, Jerome H. Reichman, and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Joseph E. Stiglitz -- Innovation, technical change and patents in the development process : a long term view / Mario Cimoli, Giovanni Dosi, Roberto Mazzoleni, and Bhaven Sampat -- Lessons from the economics literature on the likely consequences of international harmonization of IPR protection / Adam B. Jaffe and Albert Guangzhou Hu -- Intellectual property in the twenty-first century : will the developing countries lead or follow? / Jerome H. Reichman -- Ethical incentives for innovation / Sarah Chan, John Sulston, and John Harris -- Is Bayh-Dole good for developing countries? lessons from the US experience / Anthony D. So, Bhaven N. Sampat, Arti K. Rai, Robert Cook-Deegan, Jerome H. Reichman, Robert Weissman, and Amy Kapczynski -- IPRs, public health, and the pharmaceutical industry : issues in the post-2005 TRIPS agenda / Benjamin Coriat and Luigi Orsenigo -- Innovation, appropriability, and productivity growth in agriculture : a broad historical viewpoint / Alessandro Nuvolari and Valentina Tartari -- The distributive impact of intellectual property regimes : report from the 'natural experiment' of the green revolution / Tim Swanson and Timo Goeschl -- Securing the global crop commons in support of agricultural innovation / Michael Halewood -- Mode of entry for emerging markets : an ex-ante and ex-post perspective of the open source development and management of biotechnology knowledge assets / Minna Allarakhia -- Intellectual property and alternatives : strategies for green innovations / Jerome H. Reichman, Arti K. Rai, Richard G. Newell, and Jonathan B. Wiener -- Economic and legal considerations for the international transfer of environmentally sound technologies / Keith E. Maskus and Ruth L. Okediji -- Multilateral agreements and policy opportunities / Carlos M. Correa -- Preferential trade agreements and intellectual property rights / Christopher Spennemann and Pedro Roffe -- Industrial policy and IPR : a knowledge governance approach / Leonardo Burlamaqui and Mario Cimoli -- Policy options and requirements for institutional reform / Joseph E. Stiglitz, Mario Cimoli, Giovanni Dosi, Keith E. Maskus, Ruth L. Okediji , and Jerome H. Reichman.

This volume addresses from different angles the effects of IPR on the processes of innovation and innovation diffusion in general, and with respect to developing countries in particular. Contrary to a widespread view, there is very little evidence that the rates of innovation increase with the tightness of IPR even in developed countries. Conversely, in many circumstances, tight IPR represents an obstacle to imitation and innovation diffusion in developing countries. What can policies do then? This is the second major theme of the book which offers several detailed discussions of possible policy measures even within the current TRIPS regime - including the exploitation of the waivers to IPR enforcement that it contains, various forms of development of 'technological commons', and non-patent rewards to innovators, such as prizes. Some drawbacks of the regimes, however, are unavoidable: hence the advocacy in many contributions to the book of deep reforms of the system in both developed and developing countries, including the non-patentability of scientific discoveries, the reduction of the depth and breadth of IPR patents, and the variability of the degrees of IPR protection according to the levels of a country's development.