Intellectual property treaties and development

This chapter traces the link between intellectual property protection, innovation, and development trough the multilateral wto system and bilateral trade and investment treaties. In a post-trips globalized world, knowledge-intensive economies encounter increasing difficulties in expanding intellectual property protection through bilateral and regional agreements. The advances made in multilateral settings have furthermore been incremental at best. The resistance of many developing countries against trips-plus arrangements may have permanently shifted the international discourse on intellectual property establishing the need to recognize linkages with other regimes such as human rights, biodiversity, and climate change. Rather than focusing solely on raising the standards of ip protection, it shows that harmonization of intellectual property rights need to be framed in a larger context of trade and development in regional for a of like-minded countries with a common standard of development and in international fora when different levels of development require a flexible approach.