Trade and IP Project

Intellectual Property (IP) is all around us: in songs that musicians create, in new medicines, in the car you drive or phone you use, in a new technology to enable the green transformation, in a website domain or the soccer ball you play with on Saturdays, or in the latest machine technologies. IP motivates people and companies to invest in innovation, leading to economic development and progress. IP is also increasingly important for knowledge-intensive economies and societally relevant.

However, in the midst of these developments, European business is facing new questions and trying to understand how the relevance of IP changes for them, to what extent and how IP matters in their sectors and for their companies. This has also become apparent during workshops and roundtable discussions organised for this project with experts from the business community, academia, and policymakers.

Accordingly, the main focus of this project is: to examine the economic and broader societal value of IP for the EU and EU Member States. Our report is predominantly using economic analysis to understand how IP contributes to Europe’s economic development (GDP, productivity, investments, trade) and, consequently, where it should be given a more prominent role in EU policymaking. In more detail, the study:

Demonstrates how IP boosts productivity, economic development, exports and investments both in the EU and in the EU Member States.
Tracks the evolution of IP provisions in Free Trade Agreements, with the view of understanding if the current standard of provisions enables Europe to fully exploit opportunities for trade and growth.
Provides quantitative results on the relevance of IP for each EU Member State in combination with an analysis and examples of how important is IP in the context of trade.