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The US labour market has experienced a remarkable polarization in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, recent empirical work has documented a sharp increase in the wealth to income ratio in that period. Contemporary to these inequality trends, the US faced a fast technological catch-up as European countries and especially Japan drastically improved their global innovation and patenting activity. Is foreign technological convergence an important source of the recent evolution of the US wage and employment structure? Can it contribute shaping the dynamics of wealth-to-income ratio? To answer these questions, we set up a Schumpeterian model of endogenous technological progress with two asymmetric countries, heterogeneous workers, and endogenous skill formation. High ability people acquire education and become skilled, those with intermediate abilities work as unskilled workers in production jobs, and those at the bottom of the ability distribution work in service occupations. Service workers provide personal services allowing their employers to save working time. In equilibrium, only skilled workers buy personal services. Fiercer foreign competition triggered by technological catching up shifts production jobs abroad and forces domestic firms to innovate more. Hence, the employment share of production workers shrinks, while the demand for both high skilled and service sector workers rises, thus increasing polarization. Calibrating the model to match key facts of the US economy, we find that foreign technological catching-up observed between the late 1970s and early 1990s reproduces a non-negligible part of US wage polarization and substantial part of the increase in the wealth-to-income ratio in that period.

The multiple features of intellectual property rights and industrial competition are explored through the analytically rigorous lens of the frontier of the economics literature. The book covers a broad range of issues ranging from industrial espionage to collective property rights in cultural districts. The analyses are carried out both for advanced countries and in a North-South perspective. An appropriate protection of intellectual property rights plays a crucial role in promoting R&D activities and hence economic growth. The book explores theoretical issues and empirical evidence coming from different countries and sectors.

Should the intellectual property rights on the first Covid-19 vaccines be temporarily lifted in applying the Trade-Related Aspect of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) flexibility? Is it right to grant the first generation of Covid-19 vaccines a special treatment from an IPR perspective? On what grounds? By extensively reviewing the available medical and economic literature on the subject, this chapter will guide the reader step-by-step to the leading scientific, political, and cultural challenges in granting broad worldwide access to vaccination. The accumulated delays in providing effective Covid-19 vaccine intervention in the low- and middle-income countries are ultimately responsible for the virus circulation at the global level and the proliferation of immunity-escaping variants. Therefore governmental rationality around the world would suggest any possible active policy tool to scale up the current vaccines supply. However, not to prevent future investment in R&D, the governments should bear the cost of the expected increased industry obsolescence determined by a temporary patent waiver; this includes public patent-buy-outs and regulated public-private R&D partnerships.