The Effect Of Intellectual Property Rights Protection In Free Trade Agreements On China's Import Trade

In recent years,a series of new rules have been included in international high-standard FTA,among which intellectual property rights have become a significant part.As an economic and trade power,whether or not FTA would become the important platform of intellectual property rights cooperation between countries,fully excavating trade potential with trading partners and optimizing the structure of import and export trade,is the key issue for China 's high level of openness and internal reform and development.Traditional studies about the effects on FTA mainly focus on trade creation and diversion caused by the decrease of tariff levels.As the new rules of trade and investment strenches from boundary to post-boundary,terms about the protection of intellectual property are becoming more and more significant for trade flow and structure.This paper takes the example of China and uses data on products trade from 16 countries which signed FTA agreement with China to discuss the influence and functioning mechanism of import trade brought by FTA intellectual property protection clause.Results show that signature of the FTA agreement including intellectual property protection clause makes our country import more intellectual property intensive products.In addition,high-income countries and the deepening of FTA intellectual property rights protection clause will increase the import of our country's intellectual property intensive products.Further subdividing the form of intellectual property protection,our country imports more patent intensive products.Based on imitation risk and patent effect of different industries,the influence of strengthening the protection of intellectual property on import varies significantly from industry to industry,mainly increasing the import of chemical and IT technology products.In further discussion and analysis,this paper decomposes the increment of intellectual property intensive products into the influence of product category,quantity and price,results show that the increase of intellectual intensive products'trade volume caused by FTA heavily depends on quantity rather than price.Besides,this paper also uses the triple difference(DDD)method to make case studies on trade effect about FTA agreement between China and Swiss containing TRIPs-Plus provision,and it still comes into similar conclusions.This paper proves that taking active participation in negotiation of international intellectual property terms and creating a high standard of international trade and investment rules are benefit for excavating trade potential in our country,optimizing the industrial structure and speeding up the construction of an innovative country,so as to obtain highly-opened system dividends.