This chapter provides an introduction to Intellectual Property, Innovation and Economic Inequality. It begins by discussing the problem of economic inequality, including the scale of that problem, types of economic inequality, and extant research on such inequality. The chapter then outlines the structure of this volume, which is divided into three parts: (1) theoretical, empirical, and policy issues; (2) intellectual property and national inequality; and (3) intellectual property and global inequality.

Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are confronted with a new world order in which the major economic powers that promoted multilateralism have moved toward nationalism, localization of production, and de-legalization of dispute settlement in favor of balance of power diplomacy. A counterpart to this trend is declining interest in developmental assistance. It remains to be determined how countries that are not part of the new great power dynamic will acclimate to this new world. LMICs have the opportunity to leapfrog in the current technological environment. A key challenge is securing adequate capital investment, including through the private sector. There is a trend among the capital-exporting countries to negotiate bilateral and plurilateral agreements with LMICs that preclude regulatory measures requiring technology transfer as a condition of foreign direct investment. Because individual private investors within LMICs may lack substantial bargaining power, these agreements diminish LMICs’ capacity to secure favorable terms for technology transfer. LMICs confront terms of trade that favor high-income countries and, more broadly, the ascendance of managed trade policy among economically powerful states. These factors portend the perpetuation of the marked disparity in the distribution of global income and wealth. There are no “magic bullet” solutions on the horizon.

Australia has been a capital importing country almost continuously since 1788, Immigration and capital inflow, and the transfer to Australia of overseas business and technical knowledge associated with both, have been an important aspect of the building up of Australia’s economy and the development of its natural resources throughout Australian history. After a relatively low ebb during the depressed 1930s, both immigration and capital inflow revived after the second world war and played a major part in the two post-war decades of sustained rapid economic development.

The key question this chapter addresses is which countries are the most receptive to Chinese foreign infrastructure spending? I theorize electoral autocracies will be the most avid recipients. This chapter analyzes Chinese foreign spending since the introduction of the BRI at the end of 2013 with data from the China Global Investment Tracker (CGIT) dataset. Multivariate tests indicate electoral autocracies are the major recipients during the BRI timeframe, from 2014 to 2019. Extending the timeframe to 2005 to 2019, the findings indicate a substantive difference in the relationship between Chinese foreign construction spending and electoral autocracies that occurs with the initiation of the BRI. Logistics performance indicators also show electoral autocracies display the greatest improvement from before to after the introduction of the BRI. While the share of Chinese exports flowing to electoral autocracies increases during the BRI time period, it is not possible to conclude this is a deviation from previous trends; more time is needed to establish confidence for these effects. The main takeaway is the exceptional role electoral autocracies play in attracting Chinese foreign spending in the context of the BRI, especially when the leaders have an insecure hold on power.

In 2013, Xi Jinping announced the launch of the Maritime Silk Road Initiative while visiting Indonesia. However, Malaysia became a far more avid recipient of Chinese spending in the years afterward. What can account for this surprising outcome? In this opening chapter, Richard Carney explains that we should care about the answer to this puzzle because it can help us understand how China can acquire global influence by addressing developing countries’ enormous unmet demand for infrastructure and spread the adoption of its digital standards. In contrast to existing explanations that focus on the demand for foreign investment by private firms, Carney proposes a novel explanation for why demand for Chinese SOE-led investment varies across countries. He argues state versus private control over the delivery of clientelist resources varies across political regimes, and this affects the demand for Chinese infrastructure spending that is principally delivered by SOEs. He argues electoral autocracies, which hold semi-competitive elections, possess the highest demand due to their heavy reliance on clientelism coupled with a high level of state control over the corporate sector.

Chapter 6 examines the EPRDF’s evolving attempts to generate mass manufacturing employment as a distributive strategy to replace the past focus on land and thereby retain political order. The government’s initial industrial strategy was inspired by post-war South Korea and Taiwan, seeking to nurture domestic capitalists to global competitiveness in a handful of labour-intensive sectors. However, this strategy largely failed due to the limited experience of domestic firms and state agencies, and intense competition in global markets. Consequently, the growing political imperative of mass employment creation and foreign exchange earnings prompted the government to change approach, building a series of industrial parks to attract foreign direct investment in an attempt to accelerate the industrialisation drive. Despite the high political priority placed on industrial development, however, progress in industrial employment creation was consistently slower than that demanded by the political leadership. Vitally, modest job creation was dwarfed by rapid population growth, leading to a growing distributive crisis of un- and underemployment, particularly affecting younger generations.

Chapter 2 sets out the book’s theoretical approach. The first half argues that state-led development requires the formation of states with the capacity and autonomy required for effective intervention. However, it is only where state-led development aligns with elite threat perceptions that leaders make politically difficult choices to promote structural transformation. For many authoritarian regimes, it is when ruling elites face mass distributive pressures alongside resource constraints that they pursue development to expand the resources available to secure mass acquiescence. The second half of the chapter examines the specific challenges facing ‘late-late’ developing authoritarian regimes. First, the changing global economy, which is fragmented into global value chains with manufacturing driven by foreign investment, rather than domestic capitalists. Second, the delayed demographic transition that gives rise to large-scale population growth and urbanisation, enhancing mass distributive pressures. As such, regimes face severe distributive pressures at the same time as the state’s ability to address these is constrained by the global economy.

This chapter investigates whether China assumes the role of a rule-taker, acts as a rule-maker or even breaks with the system governing foreign investment. Given its significant foreign investment flows and economic and political clout, a better understanding of China’s ideas for and potential role in the ongoing reform of global investment governance is highly relevant. An analysis of China’s international investment agreements shows that China acted as a rule-taker by broadly accepting the templates of its treaty partners, while clinging to a number of defensive positions. The most recent and significant international investment agreement negotiated by China, the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, signed in principle with the EU, seems to be following a template that largely reflects the preferences of the EU. China is also a supporter of the World Trade Organization negotiations on investment facilitation. China’s role in the Investment Facilitation for Development (IFD) Agreement negotiations should be characterized not so much as a thought-leader but as a key promoter of dialogue and negotiations.

Chapter 6 analyzes firm-level patterns of collective action and finds that law-abiding firms are more likely to experience collective action for interest-based demands. Using the strike map dataset of the China Labour Bulletin, it shows that interest-based protests are less likely to invite state repression, in part because they do not target state authorities. Contrary to the assumption that those protest that ask more than the legal minimum might be more politically threatening than law-based protests, the findings in this chapter demonstrate that interest-based protests rarely breach the physical boundary of individual firms.

Chapter 7 argues that law-abiding firms’ concerns for reputation generate discursive resources, which contribute to workers’ expectations of success. Unlike collective action for legal rights, interest-based protests rarely use disruptive tactics that physically expand the scope of conflict. Instead, workers use publicity tactics to attract the attention of third-party allies who exercise direct influence over the target firm’s policies. The main channel examined in this chapter is media exposure. It shows that workers at law-abiding firms have more discursive resources due to their firms newsworthiness and thus are more prone to expect that their protests would succeed. This shows that even in the more favorable environment for atomized protests, not all workers have the resources to engage in collective action. By limiting social mobilization, the regime has been able to manage the frequency and nature of atomized protests. At the same time, workers with the resources to engage in atomized protests are much less likely to hold the central government responsible for the situation they are in.

Chapter 4 provides an overview of demand-side and supply-side drivers using literature and the Global Innovation Index indicators to explain a country’s ability to prepare for innovation. Supply-side drivers look at factors such as R&D development, the skills of a workforce, and the environment to foster innovative thinking and services. Demand drivers are the primary sources of innovative activity that can range depending on the country; some examples are entrepreneurs, governments, firms, or academia. After reviewing both drivers, the challenges and risks of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Africa are addressed. The chapter concludes with seven disadvantages and risks and explains how key opportunities will be discussed in the next chapter.

This chapter investigates how ‘society at large’ interacts with the world of international arbitration, now and for the foreseeable future. This broad topic can be made more manageable by breaking down the interaction through four focus groups within society: the media, academia, arbitration ‘clubs’, and civil society NGOs. These groups provide services to the world of international arbitration but are mostly instead what Emmanuel Gaillard terms ‘value providers’ – seeking to influence its normative structure. This chapter also touches on international and professional organisations, which are also significant value providers.

One key question is whether and how international arbitration may be expanding or at least becoming more visible through the four focus groups. A second is whether it may be becoming more diverse and indeed polarised. The chapter presents empirical evidence of ongoing ‘lawyerisation’, hence renewed concern about costs and delays. It also considers the impact of burgeoning investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) cases and coverage, especially in the general media. Analysis of newspapers in Australia and the United Kingdom as well as social media reports confirms that views about ISDS remain overwhelmingly negative – a new development that could increasingly shape the overall perceptions of international arbitration held within society at large.

This chapter outlines the framework and argumentative structure of the book. It introduces the assertion of jurisdictional authority over concession agreements, which is the key site of the analysis. While concession agreements in the 1920s were considered exclusively a matter of domestic law, in the 1950s a powerful community of scholars and practitioners argued that they should fall under an international legal order and be called ‘economic development agreements’. This internationalisation was a claim for the universality of ideas propagating private property and the sanctity of contract, as well as a rejection of the authority of socialist and anti-colonial policies to redistributive ends. Western industry, former imperial governments and liberal thinkers of law and of economics successfully claimed the international sphere for building a new legal order. The authority for such an international legal regime was based on a temporalisation of difference that relied on concepts like ‘civilisation’ and development to downgrade challenges to the rules of property protection by locating such challenges in the past. This was a process of self-authorisation through legal practice and academic writing, laying the groundwork for the later emergence of the regime of international investment law.

First published in Foreign Affairs in 1938, this essay describes the racialized regimes of labor exploitation in colonial Africa, tracing the patterns of land expropriation, resource extraction and resistance that give shape to different trajectories across the continent. Du Bois identifies immanent potentialities in this landscape from the cooperative model to the resignification of leisure. An expanded version of this essay appeared in the 1939 Black Folk Then and Now.

Despite its increasingly repressive institutions, Liberia enjoyed rapid economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s. This was due in large part to the expansion of exports produced by foreign companies granted generous concessions by the Liberian government. The first major concession was in 1926 to the Firestone Rubber Company. Rubber exports were the main source of economic growth in the 1930s. This was followed after 1945 with numerous concessions in mining, forestry, and agriculture. This chapter compares Liberia’s economic history during this period with that of Mexico under the presidency of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911), which also grew rapidly through the attraction of foreign capital. While research on institutions and economic development has often stressed the importance of limited government, periods of economic growth haven often occurred under authoritarian governments through various means to create substitutes for limited government. Histories of Porfirio Diaz’s government have argued that a system of elite coordination and rent-seeking made contracts with foreign companies credible even in the absence of representative institutions. Ultimately, however, this system fractured with the beginning of the Mexican civil war. This chapter argues that a similar system operated in Liberia, and that the inability of the elite to integrate new members resulted in the overthrow of the Americo-Liberian regime in 1980 and, ultimately, the beginning Liberia’s devastating civil wars.

Chapter 4 explains the relevant rules of armed conflict that provide for the protection against the effects of hostilities. To the extent that humanitarian law protects civilians and civilian objects, it also protects foreign investors and their investments, as far as natural persons and tangible assets are concerned. The chapter shows how the law of armed conflict balances military and humanitarian concerns and illuminates the operation of the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. In analysing the limitations of this protection, the chapter further identifies circumstances in which harm to foreign investors and their investments may be lawful under international humanitarian law. In particular, the chapter shows how foreign investments can easily become military targets and under which circumstances inflicted damage can be an acceptable side effect of military operations. The chapter thus forms the basis for the subsequent examination of international humanitarian law’s impact on individual investment treaty standards.