Parallel Imports and Price Controls
30 Pages Posted: 13 Aug 2006 Last revised: 12 Dec 2022
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Parallel Imports and Price Controls
Parallel Imports and Price Controls
Date Written: August 2006
Abstract
Price controls create opportunities for international arbitrage. Many have argued that such arbitrage, if tolerated, will undermine intellectual property rights and dull the incentives for investment in research-intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals. We challenge this orthodox view and show, to the contrary, that the pace of innovation often is faster in a world with international exhaustion of intellectual property rights than in one with national exhaustion. The key to our conclusion is to recognize that governments will make different choices of price controls when parallel imports are allowed by their trade partners than they will when they are not.
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