Welfare effects of patent protection and productive public services: why do developing countries prefer weaker patent protection?

This paper examines the welfare-maximizing degree of patent protection in a growth model where the engines of economic growth are R&D and public services. We find that an increase in public services enhances the positive and negative effects of strengthening patent protection on R&D and the volume of production, respectively. However, if public services are relatively small, the negative welfare effect associated with the decrease in production volume tends to outweigh the positive welfare effect from the increase in the growth rate, and so the welfare-maximizing degree of patent protection tends to be lower. This result provides one possible explanation for why developing countries tend to prefer weaker patent protection.