International audienceThis article addresses the issue of optimal patent protection in an economy with a downstream and an upstream sector. The key insight is that higher patent protection in the downstream sector raises the incentives of agents to do R&D in that sector but discourages innovation in the upstream sector because of a market size effect. Hence, higher patent protection in the upstream sector accelerates growth whereas higher patent protection in the downstream sector slows it down. If some innovation is socially desirable, optimal patent protection is necessarily higher in the upstream than in the downstream sector

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This paper aims at reconciling theoretical models of endogenous growth with the empirical evidence on trade and growth. In particular, we show that the conventional wisdom according to which trade is growth-impairing for a country with comparative advantage in goods with limited opportunities for learning fails to hold when the imported good is a capital good. The intuition is that the country gains access to cheaper capital goods, which raises investment, output per worker and learning by doing.

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