Weak Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights in China: integrating political,cultural and structural explanations

The discrepancy between de jure and de facto protection of intellectual property rights in China remains a heatedly debated topic. Unfortunately, political motivations have distorted the debate from its very beginning, which has not only resulted in a tendency for the different explanations to be played off against each other, but has also reinforced their specific flaws and biases. This study addresses these problems by advancing and integrating the three main explanatory frameworks for explaining the situation. The resulting integrated framework finds that structural factors such as bureaucratic fragmentation and political decentralization matter most in practical terms, but their durability cannot be understood without putting them into context. The findings also suggest that, contrary to most predictions, the future development of intellectual property protection in China might not follow the path laid down by other countries that have modernized in the past.     

Leaving,Staying or Coming Back? Migration Decisions During the Northern Mali Conflict

This paper uses a unique dataset to analyse the migration dynamics of refugees, returnees and, internally displaced people from the Northern Mali conflict. Individuals were interviewed monthly using mobile phones. Our results cast light on the characteristics of these three groups before and after displacement. In addition, we test how employment and security were related to migration status, as well as the willingness to go back home. Individuals who were employed while displaced were less willing to go back to the North, while those who owned a gun were more likely to plan to go back. Additional indicators of personal safety played a lesser role.     

Statistics Reform in Africa: Aligning Incentives with Results

While there is a strong association between limited capacity and unavailability or production of low quality statistics in Africa, poor incentives are argued to be behind Africa’s statistical tragedy. The paper explores whether incentives of leaders and donors are aligned with the production of quality statistics and proposes six concrete ways to improve the current situation.     

Political-economic problems in trade capacity building

Theoretically, trade capacity building should contribute to export-led growth and support liberal economic policies. Unfortunately, it often fails to meet this ideal due to resource misallocation, misplaced focus on existing obligations, and donor-driven implementation. This article presents a formal theory of political-economic problems in trade capacity building. I analyze trade liberalization as a repeated game with imperfect public monitoring between a developed and developing country. Modeling trade capacity building as an investment by the developed country, I show that it suffers from two problems. First, the need to enforce trade liberalization drives resource misallocation: costly projects are implemented only to build commitment capacity while others are not implemented because they encourage protectionism. Second, donor interests distort trade capacity building. Counterintuitively, if the donor can seek compensation from the recipient when it violates international trade law, it sometimes refuses to invest in low-cost trade capacity building while funding projects that hurt the recipient.     

Brandt, Edmund/Smeddinck, Ulrich (Hrsg.): Gute fachliche Praxis – zur Standardisierung von Verhalten. 2005, 198 S., brosch., € 29,–, BWV Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin. ISBN 3-8305-1053-5

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