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ojects developed by US company is supposed to come from other countries.

The exploitation of the model in pre-TRIPs regime condition gave results in line with previous findings reported in the literature on patent values, so is reasonable to think that this model is adequate to assess the value of the patents held by each country.

SHORT-RUN ANALYSIS of TRIPs AGREEMENT

The adoption of TRIPs agreement obliged all the members of WTO to reach a minimum level of patent protection. This means that some of the countries had to extend the patent protection to field before avoided like pharmaceutical and chemical industry, and some of them had also to sustain costs to adequate their laws and procedures to enforce intellectual property rights protection in order to reach the minimum standards set in TRIPs agreement.

These changes are reflected into the model through the recalculation of some parameters. For example the bilateral patenting equation won’t be affected anymore by the possibility that a country would not grant a patent for a product of some particular industry; also the data on the availability of enforcement institution are changed.

Another basic hypothesis is that in the short-run countries don’t have time to adequate to new incentives to increase R&D productivity set by TRIPs agreement, which means that the level of technology (quality of inputs) is held constant.

Hence in the short-run the effect of TRIPs agreement is only to lower the hazard of imitation of inventions, changing the way the benefits coming from new technology are allocated, increasing profits for innovations producers and reducing incomes for the countries who were use to imitate these innovations.

As we can see in Table 3 (in which all the data still refer to 1988 situation), for most of the countries analyzed the strengthening of intellectual property rights protection imposed by the TRIPs agreement lead to a net loss, since the increase of the value of their patent portfolio is not enough to cover the costs they have to sustain both to adequate their level of patent protection to TRIPs standard and to compensate the increase of the value of the property rights they have to grant on foreign countries’ innovations that they adopted.

Only few developed countries experience a positive net transfer due to stronger patent rights, because ,as explained in Maskus(2000), they held the largest patent portfolios and they didn’t have to make great economical efforts to adapt their patent policy to TRIPs standards, since their standards of protection were already equal or superior to the ones set in WTO agreement. Among these, US is the country who benefits the most from the agreement, followed by Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland.

The results of this analysis agree with Maskus (2000) conclusion that in the short-run TRIPs agreement impact is “redistributive”, since it shifts innovations incomes from less developed countries (which based the advancement of their technology level on imitation of foreign innovations), to that industrialized countries which are the innovations developers.

Table 3 - Short-run estimates of TRIPs, from McCalman(2005)

LONG-RUN ANALYSIS of TRIPs AGREEMENT

The greatest benefit generated by TRIPs agreement is the creation of incentives to invest in R&D projects