Trade Impacts of Intellectual-Property-Related PTAs : Evidence from Using the World Bank Deep Trade Agreements Database
This paper uses the World Bank database on deep trade agreements to demonstrate the rapid increase in preferential trade agreements with standards of intellectual property protection that are enforceable and elevated beyond the minimums required in...
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| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/275801620833587348/Trade-Impacts-of-Intellectual-Property-Related-PTAs-Evidence-from-Using-the-World-Bank-Deep-Trade-Agreements-Database http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35572 |
| Summary: | This paper uses the World Bank database
on deep trade agreements to demonstrate the rapid increase
in preferential trade agreements with standards of
intellectual property protection that are enforceable and
elevated beyond the minimums required in the World Trade
Organization Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights Agreement. These accords are referred to as
intellectual property–related preferential trade agreements.
The paper sets out a treatment-control econometric approach,
in which treated agreements are defined by various
characteristics and the control group is other preferential
trade agreements. This approach is used to study whether
membership in intellectual property–related preferential
trade agreements affects a country’s trade with nonmember
countries. For this purpose, the paper defines a set of
industries that intensively use intellectual property rights
(the high-intellectual property group) and a set of
industries that do not (the low-intellectual property
group). There is evidence that countries in these agreements
with the United States, the European Union, or the European
Free Trade Association experience significant increases in
third-country aggregated exports of biopharmaceuticals at
all levels of income, while exports of low-intellectual
property goods are relatively diminished, compared with the
control preferential trade agreements. This result is
reinforced using detailed bilateral sectoral trade and holds
also for exports of medical devices from higher-income
economies. Because these industries are the target of many
elevated standards in intellectual property–related
preferential trade agreements, the result suggests that
these policies affect trade volumes. Further exploratory
analysis suggests that these impacts are associated with
higher local sales of affiliates of multinational firms,
using US data. These are viewed as preliminary findings that
point to the need for further analysis. |
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