Promoting the Role of Intellectual Property Rights Regimes in National Economic Development : Supporting Imitation to Foster Innovation

This paper contributes to the discussion about the role that intellectual property and the associated legal institutions play in the context of national development. After investigating the relations of this topic with other aspects of the current discussion in International Business, an aggregation of existing theoretical models in order to build a framework that explains the interaction between intellectual property rights (IPR) and national economic development is suggested. This aggregated model suggests that IPR can play a vital role in stimulating the economic development of developing nations. The findings are evaluated using observations made concerning India's pharmaceutical sector and by relating it to other contributions in the literature