Intellectual Property Rights, Global Inequalities, and Secular Stagnation

ABSTRACT

Intellectual property rights have played an increasingly important role in the global economy since the 1994 TRIPS Agreement. The nature of this role has since come under the spotlights: do intellectual property rights foster innovation or rent seeking? Do they promote knowledge diffusion and development, or do they skew global competition in favor of Western economies? This article explores some of the most striking developments that recently occurred in the world economy, namely, the rise of inequalities and the emergence of the secular stagnation, in the light of the intellectual property rights debate. This article contends that income inequalities, both between and within countries, are partially driven by monopoly rents accumulated by a minority of large Western corporations (inequality between countries) and redistributed to a minority of employees (within countries). In both cases, the imbalance of profit and wage distribution may be contributing to global slow growth by depressing investments and consumption, ushering in an era of secular stagnation, thereby explaining some of the current trends in the global economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual property rent
• global inequality
• secular stagnation
• monopoly capitalism
• global value chains

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

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Antoine Dolcerocca

Antoine Dolcerocca obtained his PhD in sociology from Binghamton University. He is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Italy. His research focuses on environmental and political sociology, property rights and inequality, and natural resource management. His works have notably been published in Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of Radical Political Economics and Human Ecology.