Suchergebnisse

Writing in 1845 Friedrich Engels (and with him many other informed contemporaries) had few hesitations in pointing out the driving forces of the epochal transformation he was witnessing:The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second half of the last century, with the invention of the steam engine and the machinery for working cotton. These inventions gave rise, as is well known to an industrial revolution, a revolution which altered the whole civil society; one, the historical importance of which is only now beginning to be recognized.

ABSTRACTWe construct a new series of GDP per capita for France for the period 1280–1850 using the demand-side approach. Our estimates point to a long-run stability of the French economy with a very gradual acceleration toward modern economic growth. In comparative perspective, our new estimates suggest that England and France were characterized by similar levels of economic performance until the second half of the seventeenth century. It is only after that period that the English economy "forges ahead" in a consistent way.

This paper revises and updates the Campi-Nuvolari index of intellectual property protection for plant varieties (Campi and Nuvolari, 2015). The new index has been updated and provides yearly scores for the period 1961-2018 for a total number of 104 countries, which have legislation on plant variety protection in force. The new evidence highlights the tendency towards more similar and stronger systems of intellectual property rights (IPRs) worldwide, regardless of individual characteristics of countries. The signing of the TRIPS and of trade agreements with TRIPS-Plus provisions are major drivers of this process. In addition, certain features of countries such as the regulatory environment, the level of human capital, the importance of agricultural production, and openness to trade, are also significant determinants of the evolution of IPRs systems. We conclude discussing other possible applications of the data.

Abstract
In 1864, the patent law of the Kingdom of Sardinia was extended to the newly created Kingdom of Italy. In this paper, on the basis of a new dataset containing all Italian patents granted over the period 1855-1872, we examine the formative years of this crucial institutional change. Firstly, we map the characteristics of the inventors before and after the 1864 reform. In particular, we look at their nationality and geographical distribution within the country, the technological fields in which they were active, the intensity of use of the system (sporadic versus "systematic" patentees), and their investments in patent protection (measured in terms of the fees they were paying). We find that the reform of the patent system prompted a reconfiguration of the geographical structure of Italian inventive activity, producing an increasing participation of the inventors of the other pre-unitary states, and, at the same time, becoming more attractive for inventors on a large international scale. This can be interpreted as a sign of an effective integration policy, at least in this specific domain of government activity.