Intellectual Property, Innovation and Economic Inequality

While growing disparities in wealth and income are well-documented across the globe, the role of intellectual property rights is often overlooked. This volume brings together leading commentators from around the world to interrogate the interrelationship between intellectual property and economic inequality. Interdisciplinary and globally oriented by design, the book features economists, legal scholars, policy analysts, and other experts. Chapters address the impact of intellectual property rights on economic inequality, the effect of economic inequality on the protection and enforcement of these rights, and the potential use of innovation law and policy to help reduce economic inequality. The volume also tackles timely issues like race and gender disparities and the North-South divide in innovation. This book is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Intellectual property, innovation, and economic inequality Daniel Benoliel and Peter K. Yu; Part I. Theoretical, Empirical and Policy Issues: 1. Intellectual property rights and inequality: economic considerations Keith Maskus; 2. The unequal geographical distribution of innovative activity: implications for income inequality and innovation policies Carsten Fink, Ernest Miguelez and Julio Raffo; 3. Intellectual property, global inequality and subnational policy variations Peter K. Yu; 4. Is IPR a facilitator of, or a barrier to, catch-up by latecomers?: implications for global inequality Keun Lee; 5. Patents and economic inequality Daniel Benoliel and Rochelle Dreyfuss; Part II. Intellectual Property and National Inequalities: 6. Are men and women creating equal? contextualizing copyright and gender in the United States Dotan Oliar and Marliese Dalton; 7. Building innovation skills to overcome gender inequality: Mexico, India and Brazil Alenka Guzmán and Flor Brown; 8. Unregistered patents and gender equality: a global perspective Miriam Marcowitz-Bitton, Yotam Kaplan and Emily Michiko Morris; 9. Can decentralization encourage equality in the patent system? Lital Helman; 10. Inequality and asymmetry in the making of intellectual property a constitutional right Lior Zemer; Part III. Intellectual Property and Global Inequality: 11. Inequality and intellectual property: equity, innovation and creative imitation Thomas Cottier; 12. Managed trade and technology protectionism: a formula for perpetuating inequality? Frederick Abbott; 13. Sharing pathogen sequence data for global scientific research under the Nagoya protocol to the convention on biological diversity Jerome Reichman, Carolina dos Santos Ribeiro, George Haringhuizen and Paul Uhlir; 14. Distributive justice beyond intellectual property laws: an international perspective Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid.

Daniel Benoliel is Professor of Law at the University of Haifa Faculty of Law and the Director of the Haifa Center of Law and Technology.
Peter K. Yu is Regents Professor of Law and Communication and Director of the Center for Law and Intellectual Property at Texas A & M University.
Francis Gurry is an Australian lawyer who served as the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization from 2008 to 2020.
Keun Lee is Distinguished Professor of Economics at Seoul National University. He is also a Fellow of CIFAR, an editor of Research Policy, and a regular writer for Project Syndicate.