Working Paper #2014-077
Democratizing intellectual property systems: How corruption hinders equal opportunities for firms
This paper analyses how corruption affects firms’ ownership of
intellectual property titles that relate to firms’ technological,
organizational and further innovation efforts: quality certificates and
patents. Using firm-level data covering 48 developing and emerging
countries, we show corruption reduced the likelihood of firms seeking
quality certificates. Smaller firms were more affected by corruption and
benefited less from higher levels of trust in their business
environment. Corruption did not have impacts on the quality certificate
ownership of exporters, foreign- and publicly-owned firms. Firms’
machinery investments were also negatively affected. By contrast, we do
not find effects on firms’ ownership of patents.
- Keywords
-
- Intellectual property
- corruption
- trust
- firm heterogeneities
- innovation
- developing and emerging countries
- JEL codes
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- O34
- O12
- D23
- L6
- L2
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Paunov, C. (2014). Democratizing intellectual property systems: How corruption hinders equal opportunities for firms (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2014-077). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=5580