The making and consolidation of the first national trademark system: the diffusion of trademarks across Spanish regions, 1850–1920

ABSTRACT

This article studies the creation and consolidation of a trademark system tantamount to market integration and commercial specialization of Spanish regions from 1850 to 1920. We analyse the first 47,000 registrations, their geographical distribution and the drivers behind this trademark expansion. By using a lineal probability model, we find that knowledge spillovers across regions are associated with their relative trademark specialization and diversification. We incorporate the role played by transport infrastructure by calculating generalized transport costs. The results clarify the origins and evolution of geographical differences in commercial innovation and regional specialization in the first country to institute modern trademark legislation.

KEYWORDS:

• trademarks/branding
• specialization/diversification
• generalized transport costs
• regional History
• markets
• Spain

JEL:

• C25
• N93
• O34
• R12

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the guest editors of this special issue and three anonymous referees for providing useful comments and suggestions. We also benefited from conversations with Javier Barbero and Jorge Díaz-Lanchas from the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. Previous versions of this paper were presented at invited sessions held at the INGENIO seminar on the Geography of Trademarking in Spain (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, October 2019); at the Economic History Seminars of Universidad de Valencia (October 2019); and at the Special Session on Trademarks in Space in the 5th Geography of Innovation Conference (Universitetet i Stavanger, January 2020).

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Royal Decree, 20 November 1850.

2. This is true, in general, for most economies (Duguid et al., 2010, pp. 24–26).

3. See Google Maps Platform, https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/?hl=en.

4. See Geonames.org, https://www.geonames.org/.

5. See Nice Classification, https://www.wipo.int/classifications/nice/en/.

6. For further information on the database, see http://historico.oepm.es/marcas.php; to access the geolocation tools, see http://historico.oepm.es/geoposicionamiento/index.php?app=marcas.

7. Consequently, the Canary Islands and Balearic Islands, as well as the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, are excluded from the analysis because they were reachable only by sea.

8. We use a detailed 1876 map of ordinary roads as a valid representation of the network to complete the sections without railway.

9. The descriptive statistics of the dependent variable $N_{p,s}^1$ are based on the full sample (611 observations), while the regression sample (563) excludes observations that were specialized in the base period and, therefore, could not transition to specialization. For the variables that are transformed into the log scale before the econometric estimation, the minimum value is set to 1e–6.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge financial support from the Collaborative Agreement OEPM-FUAM 2018 and from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation and the State Research Agency [grant number EIN2020-112260/AEI/10.13039/501100011033].