Takes the Temperature of Marketplace Access

Study Spotlights how World Markets Value Ingenuity by Identifying Policies Affecting Consumer Access to Innovative and Creative Products

Executive Summary

Sometimes the medicine you need, you can’t take. The new movie you’ve been anticipating isn’t playing. The new album from your favorite artist isn’t available. Why is that?

The U.S. Chamber’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) helps to answer these questions with their new study, the “Innovation & Creativity Access Barometer” (Barometer). The Barometer examines how policies of the world’s 20 leading economies affect the ability of consumers to access the latest innovative and creative products.

That’s why the Barometer measures how a nation’s marketplace values ingenuity by using 16 indicators across four categories—including localization requirements, licensing and technology transfer polices, barriers to creative works, and regulation of biopharmaceuticals.

Over the past seven decades, growth in international trade and the forming of legal frameworks for intellectual property (IP) has help fueled the economic opportunity that’s lifted millions out of poverty worldwide.

However, these benefits can be undermined by polices that restrict citizen’s access to internationally sourced good and services. For instance, do regulations cause a patient to wait years for the latest cancer-fighting drug? Does an outside company have to divulge trade secrets to do business? Are there barriers to screening or distributing a new foreign film?

After previewing these results in key G-20 capitals across the world, GIPC intends to use these findings to inform policymakers about reforms that will create greater choices for consumers, spur innovation, and drive economic growth.

KEY FINDINGS

1: Both developed high-income economies and emerging markets pursue policies that penalize biopharmaceutical innovation in favor of cost containment.

 

2: Some of the most open and free economies, including all EU Member States, Australia and Canada limit access to foreign creative works through significant quotas and local content requirements.

 

3: The United States demonstrates the greatest overall openness to innovative and creative products, services, and technologies, achieving a 93 percent score across all four categories of the Barometer.