Rethinking the Role of Intellectual Property Rights in Pharmaceutical Industry of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This article attempts to analyze the role of pharmaceutical industry intellectual property rights and comparison of Saudi Arabia with other watch list and non-watch list countries according to the US trade representative Special 301 Report. Time series data (2001-2020) is used to compare and analyze the data using simple regression. Also, Covariance analysis and least square method are used to compare the data of other countries with Saudi Arabia. It was found that there is significant impact of the Saudi pharmaceutical industry on the GDP, and it has also developed its IPRs, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. Macroeconomic outcomes are strongly tied to the enforcement of IP laws in both watch list and non-watch list countries. Therefore, it is important to underline the differences in IPR in these countries. This will help us to test whether empirical results at macro-level -that are alleged to be led by the stronger or weak IP laws – hold in the actual IP Law enforcements. In this paper, we investigate the differences and similarities in IP laws in these selected countries.