The Global Distribution of Trademarks: Some Stylized Facts
Trademarks are words, signs, symbols, or combinations thereof that identify goods as manufactured by a particular person or a company, therefore allowing consumers to distinguish between goods originating in different sources. Trademarks belong to...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, D.C.
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2004/04/3346064/global-distribution-trademarks-some-stylized-facts http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14775 |
| Summary: | Trademarks are words, signs, symbols, or
combinations thereof that identify goods as manufactured by
a particular person or a company, therefore allowing
consumers to distinguish between goods originating in
different sources. Trademarks belong to the wider family of
intellectual property rights (IPRs), and once registered
benefit from legal protection against unauthorized use by
entities other than the legal owner. While some suggest that
cross-border registrations of IPRs may be associated with
welfare transfers from developing to industrial countries,
surprisingly little is known about an important component of
the global IPR system, namely, the worldwide distribution of
trademark registrations. This study provides the first step
in filling this gap in the literature. Its purpose is to
present some new stylized facts which emerge from the
analysis of a dataset compiled by the authors based on the
statistical information published by the World Intellectual
Property Organization (WIPO). Questions of interest include
the distribution of trademarks between countries of
different income levels, the share of trademark
registrations accounted for by foreign residents and its
variation across different income groups, the extent to
which poor countries participate in the international
trademark system, and the distribution of registrations
across different sectors of the economy. |
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