Intellectual Property Rights and Economic Growth: Evidence from A Cross-Country Data of Developing Countries

The paper uses a new cross-country data to test whether strong intellectual property rights protection (IPR’s) has a positive effect on economic growth for a sample of developing countries during the post TRIP’s period.We Control for a set of economic and policy variables as the level of economic development, investment, political stability, openness and geographic location. We focus on the correlation between IPR’s and economic growth. Using IVE to address endogeneity, we find that IPR protection is positively correlated with economic growth and this finding is robust to various estimations techniques confirming the previous results of Gould and Gruben (1996). Keywords: Intellectual Property Rights, economic development, economic growth, utility patent