A Comparative Analysis of Intellectual Property Rights: A case of Developed versus Developing Countries

This paper aims to elaborate the concept of the intellectual property rights and comparatively analyse intellectual property laws in the UK and Turkey. The first reason of selecting one developed and one developing country for this analysis is that, after a country level analysis of the impact of intellectual property rights on capital accumulation is conducted, the empirical analysis has shown that, as well as macroeconomic indicators, the amount of intellectual property rights also explains the differences in capital accumulation in both developed and developing countries. In the countries where IP laws are stronger, it is observed that countries benefit from FDI inflows where IPR are stronger. The second reason behind the choice of countries is that, various empirical studies have shown that companies with greater intellectual capital performs better in the UK and Turkey. For the UK, the main focus of the study is English law and EU laws where relevant2 as well as international agreements. As a result, it is found that there are on-going works on improving the IP laws in Turkey in order to comply with the EU accession criteria and international obligations on intellectual property rights protections. However, all the IP laws remain to be decree laws, and the enforcement needs to be strengthened in order to provide efficiency in the use of the written laws. As multinationals tend to get attracted to countries where there are better IPR enforcement, the impact of FDI on capital accumulation in developing countries such as Turkey can be different subject to quality of institutions including IP Laws