Are IPRs institutions meant to foster innovative activities or conversely to secure appropriation and profitability? Taking stock of a long-term empirical evidence on the pharmaceutical sector in the US, we can hardly support IPRs intended as an innovation rewarding institution. According to our...

In this paper, we construct a new index that measures the strength of intellectual property (IP) protection for plant varieties for 69 countries over the period 1961-2011. We examine the statistical properties of the index and we compare it with other measures of IP protection. We conclude that...