External pressures or domestic politics: explaining change in developing countries’ intellectual property legislation

This thesis aims to explain the change in developing countries’ intellectual property legislation as a response to their Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) obligations. When the TRIPs Agreement was negotiated during the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade talks, developing countries resisted its adoption because of their different domestic norms and traditions relating to intellectual property rights and concerns about the administrative costs of implementing the agreement. Nevertheless, when the TRIPs Agreement came into force, almost all developing countries altered their domestic intellectual property laws, and many did so prior to the deadline for implementation and/or adopted more rigorous intellectual property rules than required by TRIPs. That many developing countries have adjusted their domestic intellectual property law poses the puzzle that this thesis seeks to explain. It does so by testing two competing explanations: the role of external pressures (both in terms of great power coercion and legalisation of international institutions) and domestic politics. This thesis combines a survey of the timing and quality of 102 WTO developing country members’ legislation across patents, copyrights, and trademarks, with detailed case studies of changes to intellectual property legislation in India and Indonesia, which are both unlikely cases for compliance, but reflect different domestic political circumstances. The empirical findings demonstrate that external pressures cannot provide a satisfactory explanation, as policy change occurred both with the presence and in the absence of these pressures. In order to fully understand the change in developing countries’ intellectual property legislation, it is also necessary to analyse the preferences of domestic actors (societal and governmental) and how they interact. By arguing this, this thesis thus suggests the importance of taking domestic politics into account to explain change in developing countries’ domestic legislation as a response to inconvenient international obligations