Reconsidering patents and economic development: A case study of the Turkish pharmaceutical industry

The role that patents play in Third World economic development has been a subject of growing debate during the last two decades. The empirical evidence, however, has been insufficient to allow a closer evaluation of the contending arguments.The objective of this article is to reconsider the main issues of the debate on patents on the basis of the relatively long experience of non-patentability, that is since 1961, in the Turkish pharmaceutical industry. It is argued here that there is no simple and straightforward relationship between patents and Third World industrialization, either in the way that the supporters of the systems have perceived or on the grounds that the critics have raised their objections.