For more than 40 years, governments and professional associations have acted, voted or lobbied against the implementation of the Community Patent (COMPAT, officially called the EU Patent). The econometric results and simulations presented in this paper suggest that, thanks to its attractiveness in terms of market size and a sound renewal fee structure, the COMPAT would drastically reduce the relative patenting costs for applicants while generating more income for the European Patent Office and most National Patent Offices. The loss of economic rents (€400 million would be lost by patent attorneys, translators and lawyers) and the drop of controlling power by national patent offices elucidate further the observed resistance to the Community Patent.

Using patent-based indicators, this paper aims at explaining to what extent the production of innovation is globalized. Firstly, it provides evidence -over time, across countries and across industrial sectors -on the patterns in international technological collaboration and in cross-border ownership of innovation. Secondly, a fractional logit model is estimated for a unique panel dataset covering patent information of 21 industries in 29 countries from 1980 to 2005. The results show that countries tend to be more globalized in industrial sectors in which they are less technologically specialized. It suggests that globalization of innovation is more driven by home-base augmenting determinants than home-base exploiting ones. The empirical findings also indicate that the intensity of globalization of innovation is higher in multidisciplinary country-industry pairs and in those which compete internationally in trade.

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