Search

Trademarks are words, signs, symbols, or combinations thereof that identify goods as manufactured by a particular person or a company, therefore allowing consumers to distinguish between goods originating in different sources. Trademarks belong to the wider family of intellectual property rights (IPRs), and once registered benefit from legal protection against unauthorized use by entities other than the legal owner. While some suggest that cross-border registrations of IPRs may be associated with welfare transfers from developing to industrial countries, surprisingly little is known about an important component of the global IPR system, namely, the worldwide distribution of trademark registrations. This study provides the first step in filling this gap in the literature. Its purpose is to present some new stylized facts which emerge from the analysis of a dataset compiled by the authors based on the statistical information published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Questions of interest include the distribution of trademarks between countries of different income levels, the share of trademark registrations accounted for by foreign residents and its variation across different income groups, the extent to which poor countries participate in the international trademark system, and the distribution of registrations across different sectors of the economy.

The discipline of International Relations (IR) for a long time of its history has developed in the form of Great Debates that involved competing paradigms and schools. More recently, it has been described as a cacophony of voices unable to communicate among themselves, but also incapable to provide keys to understand an ever more complex reality. This collection aims at evaluating the heuristic value of a selection of traditional paradigms (realism and liberalism), schools (constructivism), and subdisciplines (security studies and international political economy) so as to assess the challenges before IR theory today and the ability of the discipline to provide tools to make the changed world still intelligible.

This paper explores the extent to which discrimination against foreign applicants in the trademark registration process can be used as a"behind-the-border"barrier to imports. Prima-facie evidence shows that in some developing countries the ratio of trademark registration to applications is much higher for national than for foreign applicants, which is consistent with the notion of discrimination against foreign firms. The authors develop a simple model that suggests that incentives to discriminate are stronger when foreign firms produce products that are close in quality to the product produced by domestic firms. This hypothesis is then tested and empirically confirmed in three of the four countries in their sample, suggesting that discretion and discrimination in the trademark registration process can sometimes be used as a protectionist tool.