The underexplored effects of economic transition on intellectual property rights protection: An economic geography perspective

As an institutional guarantee of technology and innovation, intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection at the national and supranational level has long been an important focus of economics and politics. However, very few studies have examined IPRs protection in the fields of geography and urban studies. Thus, this study aims to investigate IPRs protection within evolutionary economic geography (EEG) by highlighting the effect of economic transition. Taking Huaihai Economic Zone (HEZ), in China, as a sample, the study uses spatial multi-level modelling to better understand the impacts of the threefold process of economic transition (i.e., decentralisation, marketisation and globalisation) on IPRs protection. Our analysis reveals important new insights including: (1) the horizontal spatial distribution of IPRs protection is uneven both horizontally and vertically, and it has significant spatial hotspots; (2) The driving force of China’s internal marketisation and decentralisation policy positively influences IPRs protection, unlike in the Global North, because strong IPRs protection is not suitable for the economic conditions of countries in the Global South due to the negative effects of globalisation; (3) Economic transition has a major influence on IPRs protection at the prefectural level, but not at the provincial level. The contributions of the study are twofold: theoretically, it is one of the first paper to examine IPRs protection at the sub-national level within the framework of EEG, and to use the triangular process of economic transformation to explain the resulting institutional changes. Methodologically, based on the theoretical underpinnings of our study, we take different administrative levels and autocorrelation into consideration in our model.