Suchergebnisse

Introduction Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) are "the rights to use and sell knowledge and inventions" (Greenhalgh and Rogers, 2007: 541), with the aim of guaranteeing adequate returns for innovators and creators. There are different types of intellectual property protection (Granstrand, 2005): old types such as patents, trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks and design rights, and new forms such as breeding rights and database rights. Nonetheless, patents are commonly considered as the most important and representative IPR (e.g., Besen and Raskind, 1991). IPR have a long legal and economic history, since the idea of intellectual property was already present in ancient cultures such as Babylonia, Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire. Mokyr (2009) discusses the relevance of the late 19th century, when political events created a system which supported an executive that was sufficiently well organised to create a "rule of law" and respect private property rights. This argument emerges, in part, in the context of an Industrial Revolution marked by important technological improvements, whereby IPR began gradually to be accorded more respect. (.)

Since the late twentieth century there has been a growing interest in academic and political circles on inequality. In this paper, we develop a systematic analysis of the literature on this topic published in economic journals since the 1950s. This is done through an innovative approach that presents (i) an identification and characterization of the main streams of research about Inequality since the 1950s; (ii) the development of a new method of analysis that combines (ii-a) a quantitative bibliometric analysis using the VOSviewer software, which maps them into different clusters, (ii-b) a qualitative analysis, where we determine the main streams of research, based, not only on the content of each reference, but also on the context where they are cited, and provide context to the development of each cluster by analysing the most important journals, authors, and institutions. The analysis leads to the identification of seven clusters, each of them with several streams of research. Each of the clusters is characterized according to several aspects such as the journals where the contributions were published, the alma matres and academic affiliations of the authors, and the countries in which those authors are based. The leading journals and the dominant academic institutions are the same as found in economics broadly considered, but they vary from cluster to cluster. Among the authors that have had major influence in the development of this field of economic research, stand out Anthony Atkinson, Simon Kuznets, Michael Kalecki, and Thomas Piketty.