Gee’s Reviews > Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective > Status Update

despite the emergence of an international IPR regime in the last years of the nineteenth century, even the most advanced countries were still routinely violating the IPR of other countries’ citizens well into the twentieth century. As mentioned above, Switzerland and the Netherlands did not have a patent law until 1907 and 1912 respectively.

to that of the Prussian state in the early nineteenth century in the absence of private sector entrepreneurial initiatives, the Japanese state established state-owned model factories (or ‘pilot plants’) in a number of industries – notably in shipbuilding, mining, textiles (cotton, wool and silk), and military industries.

the two best 20-year GDP per capita growth performances during the 1830-1910 period were 1870-1890 (2.1 per cent) and 1890-1910 (two per cent) – both periods of particularly high protectionism. It is hard to believe that this association between the degree of protectionism and overall growth is purely coincidental.