Intellectual Property Issues in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

Intellectual property protection is increasingly the subject of international trade agreements (ITAs), and the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not an exception. The current paper is aimed at evaluating the practicability of applying the common intellectual property rights protection rules to the TPP member countries that are characterised by considerable differences in the levels of economic and sci-tech development. In the research, key approaches to studying intellectual property issues within the neoinstitutional theory were summarised, the role of intellectual property in the world economy was assessed, the developments of intellectual property rights protection in the TPP member countries were tracked, and the influence of economic factors on intellectual property rights indicators was analysed. As the results of the study suggest, the impact of such factors as the role of trade turnover, investment, and R&D expenditures in the economy is ambiguous and does not always depend on a country’s attribution to a particular cluster based on its economic and sci-tech development. Further research on the topic should place emphasis either on finding new defining factors or on studying particular intellectual property provisions in the agreement and their influence on the TPP member countries’ economies.