The United States and other developed, democratic societies have a moral obligation to ensure the world’s citizens receive COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics. But there is absolutely no need to abrogate IP rights to fulfill that objective.
Global
April 2, 2021
Intellectual property has proved to be indispensable in developing effective vaccines and therapeutics. Nevertheless, advocates have seized the moment to petition the WTO’s TRIPS Council not just to suspend patents, but also to reform national copyright laws governing digital access to knowledge, and data and text mining.
March 9, 2021
Amidst an unprecedented pace of innovation, some 90 developing nations, led by India and South Africa, have petitioned the WTO’s TRIPS Council calling for a waiver to suspend all IP rights associated with COVID-19 innovations—again asserting the false narrative that IP rights inhibit access to medicines.
December 21, 2020
The growing role of AI in trade and the long-term implications of divergent regulatory frameworks will likely affect economic productivity and innovation.
November 18, 2020
ITIF hosted a transatlantic discussion of EV battery policy and how cooperation and competition might best be balanced for this “industry of the future” that’s already here.
October 29, 2020
The 2020 GTIPA Virtual Summit brought together Alliance members with world-leading experts to explore creative solutions to difficult economic, trade, and innovation challenges facing the international community.
September 24, 2020
There is both excitement and trepidation about the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and its ability to power growth around the world—and one critical question is how its impacts may differ in developed and developing economies.
June 30, 2020
The core argument that users create value is wrong. The distribution of taxable profits between countries normally reflects where value is created. The export of a product or service, whether digital or analog, usually does not create additional value and profits from imports into a country are normally not subject to corporate income tax.
June 4, 2020
Writing for the World Economic Forum (WEF), Nigel Cory and WEF Digital Trade Fellow Mike Gallaher, summarize a recent report they authored for WEF that enumerates key steps policymakers should take to support cross-border payments and digital trade growth.
June 4, 2020
Just because DSTs may be attractive to individual countries doesn’t make them good policy. In fact, they are bad policy. A central goal of good tax policy should be to treat similar transactions the same way. DSTs violate this principle in a number of ways.
June 2, 2020
A World Economic Forum report—produced with extensive research contributions from ITIF—analyzes key barriers and challenges to cross-border payments and recommends how to overcome them to support global trade.
April 23, 2020
Recognizing the central catalytic role that intellectual property rights play in fostering knowledge-driven innovation, select members of the Global Trade and Innovation Policy Alliance (GTIPA), a global network of 36 independent think tanks supporting global trade liberalization and integration, released a statement affirming the crucial importance that IP has in our global economy.
March 30, 2020
It is widely presumed that agglomeration effects cause large cities to have large advantages in the innovative process. A new study tests this presumption by examining the proportion of patents filed in large metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2014 across 14 OECD countries.
March 23, 2020
Demand for H-1B visas, which allow U.S. firms to recruit high-skilled foreign workers, has dramatically exceeded the supply—there were 200,000 applications in 2019 for the 85,000 visas that were available.
February 24, 2020
Working together, firms from different parts of the digital economy can disrupt the supply side of the digital piracy equation to make it harder and costlier for illicit operators to function.
January 27, 2020
Countries that value an open, competitive digital economy should use surveys to improve quantitative analysis of cross-border data flows, because policymakers can’t effectively manage and address barriers to digital trade unless they can measure it.
December 16, 2019
Prior to last week’s progress toward an interim trade deal with China, the United States had repeatedly delayed the expansion of tariffs on Chinese goods to most finished products. This was out of concern that such an escalation would hit U.S. consumers harder than existing tariffs on the intermediate goods that serve as inputs for companies to make their final products.
November 18, 2019
The Global Mercantilist Index, ranking 60 nations on 18 variables ranging from market access and forced localization to currency manipulation and intellectual property protections, finds that China is the world’s most innovation-mercantilist nation.
November 15, 2019
The Non-GMO Project label is now misleading consumers on more than 60,000 food items in U.S. grocery stores. Val Giddings tells the Food & Drug Law Institute it's time for FDA to enforce the law and puit an end to this illegal practice.
October 11, 2019
Stephen Ezell presented on strengthening subsidies rules to tackle trade distortions in high-tech sectors at the 2019 WTO Public Forum.
September 23, 2019
Despite concern over climate change, global carbon emissions continue to rise. Clean energy innovation is needed to reverse the trend. It is time for Mission Innovation member nations to make good on their commitment to double clean energy RD&D.
September 16, 2019
The rise of the Internet has allowed billions of people to access services that would not exist otherwise, while driving the growth of technologies that power them. A new study has attempted to quantify this effect, examining the rate of Internet usage across 76 countries between 1995 and 2016.
August 26, 2019
Since 2015, 24 nations and the EU have joined “Mission Innovation,” pledging to double public investments in energy RD&D and collaborate on key innovation challenges. This report seeks to provide accountability for these commitments and lay the foundation for more ambitious measures.
August 19, 2019
When skilled migrants come to a new country, they bring both expertise in their fields and connections to experts in their home countries, increasing the likelihood that they will produce new inventions in the fields in which their home countries excel. New research has provided the broadest estimation of this effect, examining immigration between 135 countries and patents in 651 technological categories from 1990 to 2010.
June 17, 2019
Student mobility has increased dramatically in recent years with 4.1 million students studying internationally in 2015, more than triple the 1.3 million international students in 1999. New research shows that these students are now far less concentrated in developed nations.