The Industrial Property Rights and its Impact on Economic Growth in Egypt ( An applied study through the period 1990-2014)

The industrial property rights (IPRs) is seen to be one of the economic supporting factors that contributes to the process of economic growth on the long run, which could be achieved by two routes: motivating the domestic innovative capacity, and attracting the knowledge based technologies from abroad. The target of this paper is to measure and analyze the effect of IPRs, namely, patents, trademarks, and industrial designs, on the Egyptian GDP in both periods: short run and long run. For achieving this target, this paper adopts an analytical methodology that focuses on data interpretation and measuring the relation between the economic variables. The econometric model adopted in this paper is the Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag Model, ARDL, which is characterized by its ability to examine the dynamic relation between variables in the short run, and thus, measuring the required period for the model to achieve stability in the long run through the application of Error Correction Model (ARDL-ECM). The empirical results of this paper revealed that IPRs have positive effect on the Egyptian economic growth, where the model revealed that applying new patent and trademark applications in Egypt has a positive effect on the Egyptian real GDP, within a time series data for the period 1990-2014. On the other hand, a negative effect has been revealed for applying new industrial designs on the Egyptian real GDP during the same period. This paper recommends taking a number of reformatory procedures to stimulate filing more patents and trademarks in Egypt, either applied by nationals or foreigners, so as to motivate domestic innovative capacity, and attract knowledge based technologies from abroad.