Patenting in the Pharmaceutical Industry

The chapter investigates the returns to R&D expenditures on patenting in the pharmaceutical industry, using a panel data of 32 countries. Due to the unique situation in the industry that come from the patent being the new drug and additional clinical trials which must be conducted for safety and efficacy, the pharmaceutical industry is analyzed alone. The results indicated that for pharmaceutical patent applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the European Patent Office (EPO) and the triadic family consisting of USPTO, EPO and the Japan Patent Office (JPO), pharmaceutical R&D expenditures had no impact coming from European countries. However, for the six non-European countries in the dataset (Australia, South Korea, Mexico, Romania, Singapore and Taiwan), the R&D always had statistically significant effects on all three patent applications in the industry. The results were more pronounced when the United States and Japan were also included. While China, Brazil and India were excluded due to missing pharmaceutical R&D data, it is hypothesized that the effect of these countries would have made the results stronger.