RIPE Collection on Intellectual Property

Since the global imposition of intellectual property standards with the agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), intellectual property (IP) regularly features at the forefront of news coverage and academic research. Most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic triggered another debate on pharmaceutical research, public health, and the patent system; just as the Anthrax crisis in the early 2000s did, and as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the discovery of the first antiretroviral drugs, and the Shkreli medicine-pricing scandal also did. However, IP also makes headlines on issues of access to knowledge and culture, big data and privacy issues, as well as fraud and counterfeiting. As this collection demonstrates, IP is as relevant today as it was at the founding of the Review of International Political Economy in the mid-1990s. This collection is organized into three sections. The first section is dedicated to articles focusing on the origins and the history of IP regulation (Richards 2005; May 2007; S. Sell and May 2001). In a second section, the issue turns to the institutional aspects of intellectual property, and the role of multinational corporations, states and supra-statal organizations in the definition, implementation, and management of IP (S. K. Sell 2010; Roemer-Mahler 2013; Muzaka 2013). In the third section, we turn to articles focusing on the role of IP in relations between industrialized countries and the Global South (Zeller 2007; Verger and van Paassen 2013; Durand and Milberg 2020; Shadlen, Sampat, and Kapczynski 2020). As a conclusion to this collection, we feature two cutting-edge articles on the current and future relevance of IP to the workings of the global economy: Anton Malkin discusses its role in the Chinese challenge to US global power (Malkin 2022), while Schwartz links strict IP protection to the emergence of secular stagnation (Schwartz 2021).