The traditional land patrons (weg lowo) would often give temporary land
rights to clients (jodak).State efforts to register private property rights generated conflict between the
weg lowoand the jodak. The high subsequent cost of registering the change of
formal titles led to the gradual re-informalization of property and to land trans-
fers being made without recourse to formal land rights.
The WTO and the intellectual property rights debate
Another important aspect of property rights are those governing intellectual
property. There is an important contemporary debate about whether intellec-
tual property rights (IPRs) will stimulate the research in and development of
technology that will be of ultimate benefit to developing countries or whether
IPRs strengthen the monopoly control of technology by developed countries.
The debate about the desirability of IPRs became particularly heated after
the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in
1994,the subsequent formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and
the signing of the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs)
Agreement. The TRIPs agreement tightened IPRs, giving a mandatory and
uniform 20 years’ patent life, placed ‘tough’ restrictions on compulsory licens-
ing of patented technology by national governments, and shifted the burden of
proof of infringement-of-process patent from the patentee to the alleged
infringer. Under TRIPs developing countries were committed to upgrade their
IPR regimes in line with developed-country standards by 2006, which gave
them only six more years than developed countries.
The arguments in favour of IPRs are much like those of property rights more
generally. However, survey evidence of US R&D executives finds that only in
pharmaceuticals,chemicals and petroleum was patent protection necessary to
stimulate many inventions (and a majority only in pharmaceuticals). In other
industries, such as office equipment, motor vehicles, rubber products and
textiles,primary metals and instruments, machinery, fabricated metal products
and electrical equipment, patent protection was not important. This implies
that more than 85 per cent of inventions would have occurred without patent
protection (Chang, 2003). In such sectors professional secrecy is often
regarded as more important than patents in protecting the ideas of technology
developers. Much R&D is not motivated by profit. In 2000 only 43 per cent of
US drugs research funding came from the pharmaceutical industry itself, 29
per cent from the US government and 28 per cent from private charities and
universities (Chang, 2007). The existing patent system can encourage patent
races in which different companies compete, duplicating each other’s efforts
and wasting resources in order to be the first to claim a patent and subsequent
technological monopoly. In the past this problem has been dealt with by
government intervention. The Japanese government during the high-growth
220 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth