Harmonisation of Intellectual Property Rights Across the Globe: Impact on India’s Pharmaceutical Exports

This paper examines the impact of signing the TRIPS agreement in 1995 on the export performance of India in one of the country's leading industries, viz., pharmaceuticals. The central question asked in this paper is how the transformation from a process to a product patent regime has affected the export performance of pharmaceuticals from India. The pharmaceutical industry makes an important case for study because India’s rise in this industry is due to the adoption of imitative technology using the advantage of its process patent regime in the pre-TRIPS era. More importantly, we enquire in what way the characteristics of the destination countries in terms of their adoption and enforcement of TRIPS regulation matter for India’s export to them. We use trade data from the World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) database for the period 1990–2019 as a panel of 104 countries with diverse timelines of adherence to the TRIPS agreement. Our result, through the use of Pseudo Poisson Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimator, reveals that contrary to expectations, the implementation and enforcement of TRIPS in developing countries have a positively significant impact on their exports from India.