Intellectual property rights protection and endogenous economic growth revisited

Abstract

An analytical solution to the lab-equipment growth model (Rivera-Batiz and Romer,1991) with an exogenous imitation rate is presented and applied to study the policy tradeoff between weaker levels of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection yielding more consumption today, and stronger levels yielding more growth tomorrow. This has already been studied in Kwan and Lai (2003); however, a mistake in writing out the dynamics of the problem has contaminated that analysis. For the whole parameter space considered there, the conclusion is no longer to strengthen IPR protection partially, but fully. The tradeoff persists, though, for different choices of parameters.