Compulsory Licensing - Evidence from the 'Trading with the Enemy Act'

在发展中国家和美国，强制许可已被作为一种政策工具推进，为数百万患者提供救命药物。这项政策是《与贸易有关的知识产权协定》（TRIPS）所允许的，根据这项政策，政府允许国内企业生产由外国人获得专利的发明，而无需征得专利所有人的同意。强制许可提供了明显的短期好处，因为它允许快速获得药品和其他基本创新。的政策?然而，长期影响尚不清楚。一方面，强制许可可能会降低投资研发的动机，因为它削弱了原始发明者的产权。另一方面，强制许可可以促进发明，因为它使一批新的公司获得生产经验，这反过来又创造了在实践中学习的机会，并加强了对科学培训和其他发明所必需的技能进行投资的激励。本项目利用第一次世界大战后强制许可的外生事件来衡量强制许可对许可国国内发明的长期影响。具体而言，我们比较了第一次世界大战期间《敌国贸易法》（TWEA）强制许可对美国化学发明产生不同影响的国内发明人的专利变化。对化学专利子集的初步测试表明，强制许可对国内发明有很大的积极影响。初步测试还表明，强制许可的全部效果要在大约10年后才能显现出来，尽管有些效果在大约5年后就会显现出来。因此，由于其长期性，在分析当代数据时可能会忽略强制许可的全部影响。

Compulsory licensing has been advanced as a policy tool to deliver life-saving drugs to millions of patients in developing countries and in the United States. Under this policy, which is permissible under the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, governments grant domestic firms the right to produce inventions that are patented by foreign nationals, without the consent of patent owners. Compulsory licensing offers obvious short-term benefits as it grants quick access to medicines and other essential innovations. The policy?s long run effects, however, are unclear. On the one hand, compulsory licensing may reduce incentives to invest in R&D as it weakens the property rights of original inventors. On the other hand, compulsory licensing may promote invention as it enables a new set of firms to gain experience with production, which in turn creates opportunities for learning by doing and strengthens incentives to invest in scientific training and other skills that are necessary for invention. This project uses an exogenous event of compulsory licensing after World War I to measure the long-run effects of compulsory licensing on domestic invention in the licensing country. Specifically, we compare changes in patents by domestic inventors across U.S. chemical inventions that were differentially affected by compulsory licensing under the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) of World War I. Preliminary tests on a subset of chemical patents suggest that compulsory licensing has a large positive effect on domestic invention. Preliminary tests also suggest that the full effects of compulsory licensing set in only after about 10 years, even though some effects appear after about 5 years. Thus, due to their long-run nature, the full effects of compulsory licensing may be missed in analysis of contemporary data.