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Intellectual property rights (IPR) have become a major problem in the relationship between the industrialized West and the developing South, primarily because the West demands that developing countries adopt and enforce Western IPR. Since the relationship between US corporations and Chinese businesses is among the most successful and at the center of the current process of globalization, IPR have been a major cause of conflict and controversy between them and serve as an exemplar for this thesis. I argue, first, that the reason that a large number of Chinese businesses, especially privately-owned small and medium-sized enterprises, infringe foreign IPR lies in the nature of the difference between what have been mostly low-tech traditional Chinese businesses and high-tech industrial economies, to which intellectual property laws belong. Second, I demonstrate that the steady improvement of intellectual property protection in the more successful areas of development in the Chinese economy suggests that the solution for improved IPR protection in China and perhaps other emerging nations will follow, not precede, the development and transformation of a low-tech pre-industrial economy into an industrial high-tech economy.

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This dissertation will take a theoretical approach to analyzing certain challenges in the design of intellectual property rights (`IPR') policy. The first essay looks the advisability of introducing IPR into a market which is currently only very lightly protected - the US fashion industry. The proposed Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act is intended to introduce EU standards into the US. Using a sequential, 2-firm, vertical differentiation framework, I analyze the effects of protection on investment in innovative designs by high-quality (`designer') and lower-quality (`mass-market') firms when the mass-marketer may opt to imitate, consumers prefer trendsetting designs and firms compete in prices. I show that design protection, by transforming mass-marketers from imitators to innovators, may reduce both designer pro ts and welfare. The model provides possible explanations for the dearth of EU case law and the increase in designer/mass-marketer collaborations. The second essay contributes to the literature on patent design and fee shifting, contrasting the effects of the American (or `each party pays') rule and English (or `losing party pays') rule of legal cost allocation on optimal patent breadth when innovation is sequential and firms are differentiated duopolists. I show that if litigation spending is endogenous, the American rule may induce broader patents and a higher probability of infringement than the English rule if R&D costs are sufficiently low. If, however, R&D costs are moderate, the ranking is reversed and it is the English rule that leads to broader patents. Neither rule supports lower patent breadth than the other over the entire parameter space. As such, any attempts to reform the US patent system by narrowing patents must carefully weigh the impact on firms' legal spending decisions if policymakers do not wish to adversely affect investment incentives. The third and final essay analyzes the effects of corporate structure on licensing behaviour. Policymakers and legal scholars are concerned about the potential for an Anticommons, an underuse of early stage research tools to produce complex final products, typically arising from either blocking or stacking. I use a simple, one-period differentiated duopoly model to show that if patentees have flexibility in corporate structure, Anticommons problems are greatly reduced. The model suggests that if the patentee owns the single (or single set) of essential IPR and goods are of symmetric quality, Anticommons issues may be entirely eliminated, as the patentee will always license, simply shifting its corporate structure depending on the identity of the downstream competitor. If the rival produces a more valuable good, Anticommons problems are reduced. Further, if the patentee holds 1 of 2 essential patents, the ability to shift its corporate structure may reduce total licensing costs to rival firms. However the analysis offers a cautionary note: while spin-offs by the patentee help to sustain downstream competition, they may restrict market output, and therefore welfare. Thus the inefficiency in the patent system may be in the opposite direction than is currently thought - there may be too much technology transfer, rather than too little.

In this thesis I explore two factors that impose constraints for external finance of firms in Emerging market, the lack of property rights protection and the absence of political connections. I demonstrates that strengthening of property rights protection and sustaining tighter political connection is beneficial for firms external finance.

All western states today define themselves as nation-states, and all of these states have a political and economic structure in which an individual’s right to own private property is an underlying and pervasive feature. Drawing on examples from the historical trajectories of the US and Norway between ca 1760 and 1880, this dissertation explores the development of nation-states and the role of private property rights in this development. I demonstrate the fundamental role both of the idea of private property for the ideology of nationalism, and of the significance of a particular kind of property regime (widespread landowning) for the emergence and development of nationalism as historical phenomena. The evidence on which this dissertation relies has been extracted from historical documents consisting primarily of political pamphlets and speeches. The documents are chosen from what we can call “the national movement” e.g. dominant public debaters, policymakers and agitators. To compliment and contextualize my documentary analysis I have drawn on a range of secondary literature on social, historical and economic developments. The analysis has sought to unravel nationalism as an emerging historical phenomena in each of the cases investigated by focusing on authorial meaning in specific historical contexts. The core concept of nationalism has been arrived at by continuously comparing the developments in the US and Norway. The main points that this dissertation make are that it was the emergence of more widespread smallholding of land that was one of the most decisive preconditions for the emergence of nationalism in the US and Norway. Furthermore, this dissertation suggest that widespread ownership of land resulted in the emergence of a form of nationalism in which ownership of landed property was crucial because it became tied up with the idea of national popular sovereignty. Put in a simplified way: sovereignty was popular because property was popular (widespread). This connection was made mainly on the one hand from the real historical tie between ownership of land, juridical sovereignty and political powers, and on the other hand from the more conceptual similarity between property rights or ownership and sovereignty. I have identified two forms of nationalism based on the way that property was understood in the national ideology. The first form of the nation describes the agrarian phase of nationalism where it was real landed property that was seen to be crucial for the creation of national sovereignty. The second form of the nation describes a form of industrial nationalism. With the coming of industrial property and the expansion of wage labour, landed property lost its significance, and instead the right to the fruits of one’s labour was understood as the most important part of the property right. I have called this a shift from land to labour, or a transvaluation of property. This property rights perspective on nationalism in the US and Norway contributes to a new understanding of nationalism not only in these places but perhaps also in the western world in general. The development in the US and Norway can be seen in the wider context of the decline of feudalism and absolutism and the emergence of democratic, industrial societies in the western world. The landed, agrarian form of nationalism might in effect be a ‘missing link’ between pre- or proto-national forms of society (feudal, religious, absolutist, mercantilist, etc.), and the fully modern industrial form identified for example by Ernest Gellner. It is the connection between property (from land to labour) and sovereignty that unites them.

48 pages / Policy on the parallel imports of medicines is being debated currently in Korea. This paper looks at several countries' trends, the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement, and the Korean golf market to search for policy ideas. A simple consumer welfare benefit-cost and sensitivity analysis shows that parallel imports give not only consumers' surplus on parallel imported golf clubs, but also a much larger consumers' surplus on authorized brand versions.This paper makes the following recommendations: First, parallel imports should be permitted according to the principle of free trade, if the cost of parallel imports to the country is not much larger than the benefit. Second, even if parallel impmts are pem1itted, some exceptional cases should be allowed where international exhaustion is problematic. Third, governmental intervention, a clear labeling system, for example, is required to protect consumers, and help consumers make rational choices. / Note: This digital copy was scanned from a personal copy, and contains some underlining and marginalia.