An empirical study of the relationship between changes in intellectual property protection and international trade

This paper investigates the effects of changes in intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on export economies. We apply regression analysis to data for exports from 22 OECD countries to 58 countries. First we investigate the relations between IPR protection level and the income level of all the countries, revealing a positive relationship between the two variables. Next, we identify market expansion effects consistent with economic theory. Expansion effects are found to be smaller in countries with low imitation ability than in those with high imitation ability. Finally, change effects are used to directly test economic theory, revealing that expansion effects are larger than market power effects.