Important benefits of intellectual property rights relate to national economic competitiveness; a key issue for developing nations as they seek to industrialize and partake in the global innovation economy.

In Technological Diffusion, Convergence, and Growth, NBER Working Paper Series, Vol. w5151 (June 1995, posted SSRN June 2006), economists Robert Barro (Harvard) and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Columbia) combine various growth models to simulate technological and economic growth. Their main findings include:

• Over time, “the world growth rate is driven by discoveries in the technologically leading economies.”
• “Poorly defined intellectual property rights imply that (technological) leaders have insufficient incentive to invent and followers have excessive incentive to copy.”
• “Imitation differs from innovation in that the number of goods that can be copied at any point in time is limited to the finite number that have been discovered elsewhere.”
• “The innovator’s adaptation of a new product to another country amounts to technology transfer through foreign direct investment... the guarantee of intellectual property rights motivates researchers to consider the worldwide benefits of their inventions.”