An international patent protection system: A new approach

For all practical purposes, there are two patent protection systems in the world today. The developed countries have national systems, although different in some respects, that provide reasonably effective protection for patent holders. On the other hand, the less developed countries have national systems that are generally not enforced. The lack of enforcement is primarily because these countries own less than one percent of the world's patents. Thus, they have little reason to provide effective protection for those in the industrial countries who hold patents. It would seem advantageous to all concerned to develop a patent system that is accepted by the majority of nations. This study uses an analysis of the major economic and social implications of the present system to propose a suggested approach to a truly international patent system. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

International patent systems strength 1998–2011

In this paper we report on a composite index of international patent systems strength for 48 developing and industrialized countries annually from 1998 to 2011. Building upon earlier indices we develop a conceptual framework informed by transaction cost theory and derive measures which emphasize the importance of enforcement-related aspects of the patent system of countries. Findings reveal harmonization of the regulative aspects of patent protection internationally in the post-TRIPs era but not of overall national patent systems. The index should inform studies on the relationship between national patent systems and a range of international business and other phenomena.     

Free trade and the environment

In this essay I examine the impact of ‘free’ international commodity markets and ‘free’ national factor markets on environmental quality in the context of a ‘small’ country committed to Lindahl taxation of environmental degradation. The ‘gains from trade’ proposition, as well as GATT Article XX, serve as the backdrop for my analysis.     

Institutions and moral hazard in open economies

I investigate the interaction between international trade and national institutional development in an environment characterized by heterogeneous individuals choosing their education levels to maximize their utilities; and institutions alleviating moral hazard by allowing managers to better observe and verify the productive efforts of workers. Liberalized trade allows institutions to serve as independent sources of comparative advantage. In this setting, I examine the effect of trade liberalization on the distribution of income in institutionally developed and underdeveloped nations. Trade affects income via a direct effect on prices and an indirect effect on the incentives to invest in education.     

Economic Diplomacy and International Trade: ASEAN’s Quest to Value‐Claim

Utilising economic diplomacy theory, this study specifies a statistical model to reveal ASEAN members’ capacity to negotiate better international trade outcomes. Examining imports into ASEAN members from 134 nations between 1980 and 2001, we find that ASEAN’s diplomats were able to pursue more ‘value‐claiming’ in economic diplomacy than expected. While our results support the commonly accepted view in economic diplomacy that smaller nations are pressured to accept trade outcomes desired by larger nations, we also find support for a new perspective: smaller nations obtain more favourable trade outcomes, as members of a regional trade bloc, which cannot be achieved as individual nations. We find that ASEAN’s conversion to a fully fledged regional trade agreement in 1992 significantly enhanced this capacity. This study adds a different perspective to the substantial literature examining cases in trade and economic diplomacy.     

Multiple influences on corporate governance practice in Nigeria: Agents,strategies and implications

The literature on the convergence of corporate governance systems across different institutional contexts has often taken the role of ‘agents of convergence’ for granted. Against this background, we examine the influences of three major agents – international organisations, rating agencies, and local institutions – on the development of corporate governance practices in Nigeria. Findings indicate that the understanding and practice of corporate governance in Nigeria are in a flux and being pulled in multiple directions by the agents studied. This paper provides one of the very few studies utilising sub-Saharan African (Nigerian) data in international business governance research.     

Are There Such Things as International Property Rights?

This paper argues that the process of economic globalisation is to remain partial, because of its continued reliance upon the national institutions in charge of the definition and enforcement of private property rights. Emerging economies often face critical enforcement problems, but the experience of the European Single Market also suggests that, in this respect, institutional convergence remains extremely slow. Second, the globalisation process since 1990 has seen a sharp growth in private inter‐temporal contracts, exemplified by private financial transactions and by contracting on intellectual property rights; both are much more vulnerable to local institutional failures than trade in tangible goods and sovereign credits, which were the hallmark of previous phases of international liberalisation. Thus the ‘frontier’ of globalisation now makes markets more exposed to the underlying fragmentation of national property institution than before. This suggests that multilateral negotiation, as an instrument for the coordination of State institutions, will remain the backbone of international economic integration.     

专利标准化对国际贸易作用的机理研究及实证——基于标准与国际贸易关系研究现状

文章在对国内外关于标准与国际贸易关系研究现状综合分析的基础上,对标准促进国际贸易发展的正面影响进行研究。标准对国际贸易的负面影响,即技术性贸易壁垒是国内理论和实证研究的主流。"技术专利化、专利标准化、标准国际化"成为创新型国家提升国际贸易水平的主要手段,本文从法理性、网络性、传播性等方面研究了专利标准化对促进国际贸易产生的积极效应。建议国内学者加强标准对国际贸易正面影响的研究,为转变我国国际贸易方式提供理论支撑。     

Business under adverse home country institutions: The case of international sanctions against Myanmar

We expand the institutional perspective of international business by exploring the range of institutions outside the host country that influence international business. We use a critical case, Myanmar, to explore the dynamics of institutional constraints and the reaction of business to such constraints. Our in-depth case analysis focuses on four industries for the period 1996–2011. On this basis, we develop the concept of ‘low profile strategy’ and propose a conceptual framework of home country pressures influencing multinational enterprises’ international operation, and the variation of their impact across industries and firms. This framework provides a foundation for future work on the extra-territorial effects of institutions in international business.     

The Brave New World of International Education

An emerging international market for education is exploding through the confluence of both new demand and supply factors. The demand factors include important and reciprocal demographic changes in both the developed and the developing world, and a new emphasis on improving ‘human capital’ as a source of national competitiveness and equity. The supply factors include the adoption of new competitive trading strategies by countries competing for students with the United States; changes in the need for ‘lifelong learning’ and the information technology revolution. This article analyses these dynamic factors and discusses remaining bottlenecks to the expansion of international trade in education. The article concludes by laying out some of the implications for the future of the national and international education markets.     

Ethno-national ties and international business opportunity exploitation: The role of environmental factors

This paper examines the effect of ethnic populations on international opportunity exploitation at a societal, or national, level. Past research shows a relationship between ethnic ties and international opportunity at an individual level; however, little is known about the role of ethnic ties and international opportunity at a national level, which is called ‘ethno-national ties’ in this study. In order to acquire in-depth knowledge of this subject, we studied a population of Chinese who are living outside their home country and applied contingency theory principles to investigate environmental boundary conditions that affect this population. Data collected from Chinese exporters indicate an overall positive effect of ethno-national ties on international opportunity exploitation—an effect that is influenced by three moderating variables: technological turbulence, psychic distance, and export barriers. Technological turbulence and export barriers weaken the effect of ethno-national ties on international opportunity exploitation while psychic distance enhances the effect.     

Globalization and the ‘confidence game’

We show that governments in developing countries have an incentive to play the “confidence game” — wherein the need to win the confidence of the international capital market ‘can actually prevent a country from following otherwise sensible policies and force it to follow policies that it would normally consider perverse’. This incentive arises because of a combination of a ‘conformity bias’ and ‘good news bias’ in governmental decision making in an open economy, which results in inefficient outcomes which increases rather than decreases the threat of devaluation. While institutions that encourage greater transparency and the public revelation of information, may often mitigate this inefficiency, on some occasions increased transparency may even exacerbate the inefficiency.     

Whither globalisation and convergence? Asian examples and future research

Among the most popular of buzzwords and debated topics for governments, policy-makers and management as well as academia are ‘globalisation’. Under its influence, one implication is that there is ‘convergence’ around a set of universally applicable and transferable beliefs and ‘global’ standards or ‘best’ practices which in turn produce ever more standardization with homogenized and similar nations and practices – the ‘McDonaldisation’ of everything. However, this is not a new idea and needs historical grounding and context. Also, in Asia, we can see globalization differently with not only constraints and alternatives, but even counter trends at both institutional and cultural levels, such as post-1980s ideas of the ‘Japanisation’ of management and industries and now the so-called ‘Korean Wave’ of Korean entertainment and popular culture rolling out over parts of the world. This indicates that globalization’s converging impacts are less all-powerful than is often portrayed and thought.     

Patent enforcement across 51 countries – Patent enforcement index 1998–2017

Indices are central for comparing the strength of patent systems across countries in international business research, intellectual property management and policymaking. However, existing approaches rely on book laws while most variance across countries emerges from enforcement. We address this weakness and present the Patent Enforcement Index which tracks differences in patent enforcement for 51 countries between 1998 and 2017. We utilize novel firm-level enforcement data and extend the conceptual framework of the patent systems strength index provided by Papageorgiadis et al. (2014). The new index reveals previously uncaptured volatility in patent enforcement and can be decomposed into three topical sub-indices.     

Cross-border production sharing and exchange-rate sensitivity of Mexico's trade balance

Increasing patterns of international trade occur in the form of cross-border production sharing – the dispersion of separate blocks of an integrated production process across different nations. In the case of ‘standard’ or ‘ordinary’ trade, imports are destined for use in the importing country, and exports are largely produced within the country. However, with production sharing, imported parts and components are destined for inclusion in the country's exports. A depreciation of a nation's currency raises its exports. At the same time, imported components become more expensive, which partly offsets the expansionary effect of the depreciation on exports. Using a simple theoretical framework, this paper shows that production networks lower the sensitivity of a country's trade balance to changes in exchange rates. The empirical examination finds Mexico's Maquiladora trade balance to be unresponsive to changes in both, its real effective as well as its real peso-dollar rates, while that for non-Maquiladora category is significantly responsive, in confirmation with the theorized hypothesis.     

Transitioning into a ‘throwaway planet’

It is generally considered to be safer for the environment to repair a malfunctioning product for further reuse than to dispose of it and replace it with a newly manufactured product, unless the product is being replaced with a more energy efficient alternative. However, whereas United States has long been labelled a ‘throwaway society’, this paper presents the results of an international consumer survey which demonstrates that as other nations develop with respect to GDP per Capita (Gross Domestic Product per Capita), they too start transitioning into throwaway societies. This transition then calls into account of just how environmentally damaging this practice will become.     

External Public Debt,Trade Linkages and Contagion During the Eurozone Crisis

Against the backdrop of the contagion literature, the paper analyses the impact of financial and trade linkages on sovereign bond spreads in the Eurozone crisis. Using quarterly data for a sample of EMU countries during the period 2000–13, we estimate fixed‐effect panel models with Driscoll and Kraay standard errors that are robust to general forms of spatial and temporal dependence. Our main results can be summarised as follows: first, we suggest that the ‘sudden stop’ of capital inflow towards the peripheral sovereign debt triggered a re‐segmentation of financial markets and economic systems along national borders, with negative implications for risk‐sharing and the efficient allocation of capital. The ‘home bias’ effect – that is the increase in the share of sovereign debt held by domestic banks – worsened the country‐specific risk because the twin crisis (sovereign and banking) began to be conceived as more closely intertwined within countries than before. Second, the structure of international trade helps to account for the geographic scope of contagion, even after controlling for macroeconomic and fiscal vulnerabilities. Finally, the ‘substitution effect’ of public debt securities of stand‐alone emerging countries has affected more the sovereign spreads in the core than in the periphery.     

Varieties of entrepreneurship: exploring the institutional foundations of different entrepreneurship types through ‘Varieties-of-Capitalism’ arguments

While entrepreneurship researchers agree that institutions ‘matter’ for entrepreneurship, they also have a rather encompassing understanding of institutions as almost any external factor that influences entrepreneurship. Ultimately, this literature thus comes up with a long list of institutional factors that may explain entrepreneurial differences between countries. But which institutions are most influential? How do these institutions relate to different types of entrepreneurship? And to what extent are institutions complementary to each other in the way they sustain different entrepreneurship types? The literature on ‘Varieties-of-Capitalism’ (VoC) offers a parsimonious theoretical framework to address these questions. Based on the VoC literature, we theoretically derive a consistent set of institutional indicators that can explain differences in entrepreneurship types between countries. Based on principal component and cluster analyses, we illustrate how 21 Western developed economies cluster around four distinct institutional settings. Furthermore, we use simple OLS regressions to show how these institutional constellations are related to different types of entrepreneurship. We conclude that four different ‘Varieties of Entrepreneurship’ can be identified across the Western world. The main implication of our findings is that a ‘perfect’ institutional constellation, equally facilitating different types of entrepreneurship, does not exist. Policy-makers seeking to stimulate entrepreneurship are thus faced with the trade-off of targeting policy reforms to that entrepreneurship type they intend to promote—at the expense of other types of entrepreneurship and the broader societal consequences such reforms will have.     

A general equilibrium model of bilateral trade with strategic public investment in commercial infrastructure

We explore how public investment in commercial infrastructure affects the composition of trade between countries. To this end, we develop a model of bilateral trade in which two countries produce, consume, and trade a continuum of goods. Goods are produced by a single homogeneous factor, labor, the productivity of which depends on the quality of the country’s commercial infrastructure, broadly conceived to encompass transportation, communication, and power transmission networks; regulatory and legal institutions; and basic research and educational systems. Countries may improve the quality of their commercial infrastructures through increased public investment. However, returns on these investments are constrained by fixed ‘natural’ endowments, with the better-endowed country enjoying greater labor productivity for a given level of public investment. We begin by analyzing optimal investment in public infrastructure in one country when public investment by the trading partner is fixed. We find that, ceteris paribus, greater public investment in commercial infrastructure raises general labor productivity, leading to gains in workers’ real income. We then analyze a non-cooperative game in which both countries strategically vary public investment in commercial infrastructure. We find that, in a Nash game, the better-endowed country optimally spends more on infrastructure and produces the goods requiring the greatest labor productivity. However, in a Stackelberg game, the results are ambiguous. An empirical analysis based on recent international trade data supports our theoretical finding that investment in public infrastructure is positively related to the export of ‘high-end’ goods.     

Measuring International Trade Costs

The costs of international trade have become an increasingly important item in trade negotiations (under the heading ‘trade facilitation’) and element of trade theory, but definition and measurement of trade costs remain in their infancy. This paper argues that the most conceptually appropriate measure is the gap between cost‐insurance‐freight (cif) and free‐on‐board (fob) values of traded goods, but that this must be measured on a consistent volume of trade. Such data are only available for a few countries. We calculate cif–fob gap values for the three largest trading nations that report such data (Australia, Brazil and the USA). These values provide plausible estimates of ad valorem trade costs for the three importing countries and for all countries’ exports. The estimates indicate that although trade costs have fallen over the last two decades, average trade costs now exceed the average tariff rate on imports into the USA and Australia. Country rankings by the cif–fob gap values differ significantly from those by commonly used proxies for trade costs, such as the indicators of time and cost in the World Bank’s Doing Business database, and analysis based on such proxies is likely to produce misleading results.