Protecting Intellectual Property Rights: What Role for Preferential Trade Agreements?

Today, more than half of international trade is regulated through preferential trade agreements (PTAs). While in the past, these agreements served as tools to eliminate further tariffs between the parties, today we witness the increasing inclusion of trade-related provisions such as Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) protection, competition clauses or behind-the-border regulation. This paper asks what explains both depth (degree of commitments) and scope (coverage) of IPR provisions? In addition, it explores who are the main advocates of IPR protection and how successful are their approaches to embed IPR protection in PTAs? This paper presents novel fine grained data which captures the variation in the design of IPRs in PTAs building on the DESTA database which includes 580 treaties (www.designoftradeagreements.org). We pay particular attention the degree to which these obligations go beyond WTO commitments. We review the literature and provide a large scale test for some of the dominating explanations to account for IPR protection through international law instruments. This paper speaks to the broader literature on international cooperation, international political economy, forum shopping and treaty design.