Imagine some difficult intellectual property rights (IPR) negotiations between a superpower and an emerging economy. Negotiators from the superpower demanded that its IPR be respected. Their counterparts from the emerging economy shrugged: ''Well, we are still a developing country, but we need to promote education and facilitate learning.'' In other words, IPR piracy had to go on in the emergin...

Research on the counter-reforms to Article 27 of the Mexican constitution has been challenged to bridge microand macro-level data and illuminate a general refusal to privatize land. Here, a layered approach poses a few possible answers. Drawing on data for the state of Campeche, I relate how ejido members effectively expanded their landholdings via the counter-reforms. Drawing on data for the m...

This Article examines treaty body compliance discourse through an examination of the CEDAW Committee’s jurisprudence related to sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on the constructivist literature and the sociological framing literature, Part I of this article introduces adoption and adaptation as key features for domestically enforcing treaty obligations. Part I also introduces the CEDAW Committee com...

A medical prize fund could improve the financing of drug innovations A t Christmas, we traditionally retell Dickens's story of Scrooge, who cared more for money than for his fellow human beings. What would we think of a Scrooge who could cure diseases that blighted thousands of people's lives but did not do so? Clearly, we would be horrified. But this has increasingly been happening in the name...

Economic theory predicts a positive relationship between property rights and economic growth. However, few developing countries have experienced better economic performance after improving their protection of property rights. The following manuscript addresses this puzzle by directly assessing where property rights reforms have been effective. I argue that multiple, reinforcing credibility mech...

In this examination of communal violence (intrastate armed conflict between two non-state groups), we examine the relationship between one aspect of state institutional strength—property rights protection (PRP) – and inequality between social groups. Using a contest success function model, we build in an assumption that increasing PRP reduces the effectiveness of appropriative effort, generally...

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the design of a highly flexible, electronic market place for learning resources called UNIVERSAL Brokerage Platform (UBP). Integrating learning resource related data in a semi-automatic way demands a flexible data model. The main components of an educational brokerage platform are learning resources, agents, intellectual property rights, and delivery s...

a r t i c l e i n f o Inspired by the Chinese experience, we develop a Schumpeterian growth model of distance to frontier in which economic growth in the developing country is driven by domestic innovation as well as imitation and transfer of foreign technologies through foreign direct investment. We show that optimal intellectual property rights (IPR) protection is stage-dependent. At an early...