wipo-pub-944-2022-en-world-intellectual-property-report-2022

To read the full report from World Intellectual Property Organization, please click here.

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By controlling large volumes of data, officials believe they can gain economic advantage in the digital economy and be better positioned to counter the market power of the giant platforms. But advocates of data sovereignty may be misguided. Researchers cannot yet ascertain if economics of scale and scope in data will yield competitive advantage. However, the hoarding of data by nations or firms may reduce data generativity and the public benefits of data analysis.

In this essay, Professor Susan Ariel Aaronson of George Washington University provides an overview of data governance and trade, and the defensive reactions of governments around the world as data becomes more central in today’s economy – and how trade agreements may facilitate rather than limit restrictions.

To read the full report from the Hinrich Foundation, please click here. 

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While the U.S-China phase one trade deal tackled some important sources of bilateral tension and aimed to boost Chinese purchases of U.S. goods and services, it was silent on industrial subsidies and related matters, leaving them for the next phase of negotiations, the fate of which is now in question. U.S. concerns on these matters are shared by other trading partners including the European Union (EU) and Japan. Yet despite widespread disapproval of such practices, building new global rules to combat subsidies has proven challenging. This is due to several factors, ranging from gridlock at the WTO, differences of views among like-minded countries on the required level of ambition, and uncertainty as to how best to approach the enormous complexities in China’s subsidies and related policies.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has sought to unpack this complexity, conducting recent studies of Chinese subsidies in two key sectors: aluminum and semiconductors. Both studies illustrate how Chinese subsidies are not simple cash handouts from the state to protected firms so that they can sell at favorable and distorting prices. The OECD finds subsidies can take various forms, including downstream or upstream help that trickles up or down to the firm that’s intended to benefit. They can take the form of favorable equity or debt purchases or bonds provided at below-market rates. And with interconnected global value chains, subsidies can effectively be granted covertly, intended to benefit one firm that might be several links away along the chain.

In China, the problem is compounded by an opaque “party-state” structure that obscures not only the recipients of subsidies, but also the source. According to Mark Wu, a Harvard Law School professor who previously served as the Director for Intellectual Property in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, subsidies not only flow directly from government bodies in Beijing, but also indirectly through informal responses to directives — sometimes even left unsaid, but understood — from the Chinese Communist Party.

Against this backdrop, the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) convened two roundtables in the fall of 2019 and the spring of 2020 to discuss how best to build a new rules-based infrastructure that might combat such subsidies and prevent trade-distorting results such as unfair competition, market access barriers, and, above all, overcapacity in global markets. Experts from the private sector, think tanks, governments, and academia weighed in with possible solutions, which included:

1. Negotiating new rules in the WTO;
2. Using the WTO dispute settlement system, despite its often-discussed flaws;
3. Forming ad hoc rules-based approaches, where possible, like the U.S-EU-Japan trilateral initiative;
4. Plurilateral negotiations conducted on a sector-by-sector basis;
5. Forming coalitions of like-minded trading partners to establish an alternative model, much in the way that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was framed.

During the roundtables, most experts agreed that there is no silver bullet that solves the subsidy and related issues on its own. And most agree that, left unaddressed, the problem is likely to deepen. The COVID-19 pandemic might even exacerbate it by leading to more state involvement in economies around the world and making it hard to discipline Beijing’s practices. Recognizing all of these real challenges that the international trade community faces, the roundtables reached the following key conclusions:

1. Transparency on the scope, level, and nature of industrial subsidies is vital;
2. Efforts to publicize the ongoing work in these areas, particularly that being done by the OECD, should accelerate;
3. Turning research into tangible new policies is a key step; and
4. Persuading China to agree to updated rules will be necessary, given that China is a singular contributor to overcapacity.

Wendy Cutler joined the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) as Vice President in November 2015. She also serves as Managing Director of the Washington, D.C. Office.

To read the original brief, click here.

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Now the United States and China are the main protagonists in this technologically driven competition, but Japan remains an indispensable player. The resulting zero-sum landscape has produced protectionist policies that have not been pursued widely since the 1980s and 1990s, when U.S.-Japan economic competition was at its height. The high stakes behind this current shift promise to make this era of technonationalism longer lasting and more intense than earlier periods.

Japan and the United States have watched warily as China’s economic heft has grown and as the technological sophistication of its manufacturing base has increased. Beijing’s penchant for pursuing a state-driven economic and innovation model has not allayed their concerns. This reemergence of great-power competition is coinciding with the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which an early lead in technological mastery of certain strategic fields like AI and quantum computing could put a country (and its allies) in an unassailable leadership position. Fear of “losing” this competition is fueling an unprecedented scale of investment and a zero-sum mentality that could tempt countries to overreact in ways that would damage their national interests and broader global interests.

To view the original report, click here.

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There are currently too few promising projects in the clinical trial pipeline to guarantee at least one vaccine soon. More projects need to pass through the development pipeline in parallel. Vaccines should ultimately be widely available to all who need them at low cost.

Private life-sciences companies under-invest in vaccine development, especially when compulsory licensing and/or price regulations are imposed. Public funding is needed to reduce the risks of investing in vaccine development, and also to balance compulsory licensing and/or price regulations with incentives for private firms.

The public funding being put into identifying COVID-19 vaccines is too limited to carry enough projects through so that at least one vaccine, and preferably more, become available at large scale and low cost. Public budgets for these efforts need to be multiplied up several times over. We propose a staged support scheme to tackle the COVID-19 vaccine challenge and a moon shot programme to meet the challenge of future pandemics. We calculate the public budget needed to ensure supply of COVID-19 vaccines. Although substantial, the budget represents a bargain compared to the avoided health, social and economic costs.

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To view the full report, click here.

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This publication examines trade and global value chains, cross-border investment, financial integration, the movement of people, and subregional cooperation.

The theme chapter of this year’s report explores the potential of technology to boost productivity in aging economies. It discusses how countries can promote and adopt innovations to turn demographic challenges into opportunities. The report covers the 49 member countries of ADB in Asia and the Pacific.

To see the article click here

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Many important knowledge gaps remain about the processes and factors that influence the implementation of trade treaties, which can explain the variation in implementation between countries and their effects on access to medicines. Furthermore, rigorous evaluation of the effects of trade treaties on access to medicines is restricted by the limited availability of data, and a lack of uniformity in indicators and weak study methods.

To access the original source: Click here

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