Will Stronger Intellectual Property Rights Increase International Technology Transfer? Empirical Evidence from U.S. Firm-Level Panel Data

尽管许多受人尊敬的学者在过去20年里做出了不懈的努力，但知识产权(IPR)的国际影响在国际经济学中仍然是一个研究不足的领域。拟议的研究将采用一种新的方法来分析不断变化的知识产权制度对创新和国际技术转让的影响。在过去的二十年里，一些国家对其知识产权制度进行了广泛的单边改革，往往是为了回应来自美国或其他主要贸易伙伴的外交压力。通过使用美国经济分析局对美国跨国活动的调查数据，这项研究将能够检查单个跨国企业对最近这些有据可查的知识产权制度变化的反应。使用有关出口、投资、附属公司销售，特别是向国外转让技术的公司层面的数据，为作者提供了许多不同的维度，我们可以在这些维度内探讨这些问题。原则上，人们可以观察到同一公司对不同国家的各种知识产权改革的反应，从而能够更好地衡量各国特点和专利改革的特定方面对利益变量的不同影响。这些丰富的数据将使这项研究能够避免许多困扰之前努力的问题。这种改进的经验方法有可能加深对知识产权对公司一级决策的影响的理解，并进一步为当前关于如何执行最近极具争议的知识产权国际条约的政策辩论提供信息。20世纪90年代缔结的《与贸易有关的知识产权协议》是这些条约中最重要的一项，它要求大量发展中国家加强其专利和其他知识产权制度。虽然一些签约国仍有几年时间来完全遵守TRIPS协议的条款，但发展中国家和发达国家之间已经就TRIPS的影响存在着尖锐的分歧。发展中国家的许多政策制定者认为，TRIPS规定的政策变化将违背他们的国家经济利益，将租金转移给总部设在世界上最发达国家的跨国公司专利持有人，特别是美国。主张强有力的知识产权的人反驳说，加强发展中国家的知识产权将在发展中国家和发达国家引发更多创新，促进更快的经济增长。这些倡导者还认为，加强知识产权将加快技术从发达国家向发展中国家的转让，确保从这一政策变化中获得相对平等的利益分配。与这场辩论同样重要的是，对立双方的相互竞争的主张缺乏足够的实证研究依据。通过审查跨国公司对早于TRIPS协议的国际知识产权协议的反应，这项研究将为指导正在进行的国际政策辩论提供宝贵的证据。

Despite the dedicated efforts of many respected scholars over the last 20 years, the international impact of intellectual property rights (IPR) remains an understudied area within international economics. The proposed study will take a novel approach to the analysis of the impact of changing IPR regimes on innovation and international technology transfer. Over the past two decades, a number of countries undertook extensive unilateral reform of their IPR systems, often in response to diplomatic pressure from the United States or other major trading partners. By employing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis's survey of U.S. multinational activity, this study will be able to examine the responses of individual multinational enterprises to a series of these reasonably well-documented recent IPR regime changes. The use of firm-level data on exports, investment, affiliate sales, and, especially, technology transfer abroad provides the authors with a number of dimensions of variation within which we can explore these issues. In principle, one can observe the same firm responding to various kinds of IPR reform in different countries, allowing for much better measurement the differential impact of national characteristics and particular aspects of patent reform on the variables of interest. This wealth of data will allow this study to avoid many of the problems that have plagued previous efforts. This improved empirical approach has the potential to deepen understanding of the effects of IPR on firm-level decisions and further inform the current policy debate over the manner in which recent and highly controversial international treaties on intellectual property rights should be implemented. The most significant of these treaties, The TRIPs (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement, concluded in the 1990s, requires a large number of developing countries to strengthen their patent and other intellectual property rights (IPR) systems. While some signatory states still have several years to fully comply with the terms of TRIPs, there is already sharp disagreement between developing and developed nations concerning the impact of TRIPs. Many policymakers in developing nations believe that the policy changes mandated by TRIPs will work against their national economic interests, transferring rents to multinational corporate patentholders headquartered in the world's most advanced countries, especially the United States. Advocates for strong IPR counter that strengthening IPR in developing countries will induce more innovation, both in the developing world and in the developed world, fostering more rapid economic growth. These advocates also believe that a strengthening of IPR will accelerate the transfer of technology from the developed world to the developing world, ensuring a relatively equal distribution of gains from this policy change. As important as this debate is, the competing claims of the opposing sides have been insufficiently grounded in empirical research. By examining the response of multinational firms to international IPR agreements that predated TRIPs, this study will provide invaluable evidence to guide the ongoing international policy debate.