This paper engages with the literature on intellectual property rights by adopting an evolutionary economist’s approach to the study of technologies.

Plant breeders face a unique appropriation problem - plants are reproducible, genetic information is heritable and seeds can be multiplied. The paper uses indicators of varietal age as a proxy for durability to examine strategies of planned obsolescence. Using wheat breeding in the UK, evidence...

Unlike patents and intellectual property rights in plant genetic material, TRIPs negotiations concerning geographical indications have not entered wider public imagination. However, TRIPs negotiations in this area have been and continue to be contentious. One area of contention is the explicit...

The chapter explores the relationship between the standards of intellectual property protection, the nature of technical advance in a sector, and the wider 'selection environment' within which technical change occurs. Taking plant breeders' rights as the focus of attention, the chapter explores...

This paper has two main purposes. First, it examines the way technological change has been treated in the analysis of labour surplus dual economies, concluding that technological dynamism actually 'matters' in the labour surplus phase of development. The discussion is based on Arthur Lewis's...

In this paper, we employ the notions of digital inequality and digital divide to describe two levels of access to Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). On the one hand there is the inequality of access to the cluster of technology measured by Internet use intensity and on the other...