Challenges and Opportunities of Intellectual Property Rights Protection in Pakistan

This study examines challenges and opportunities pertaining to protection if intellectual property rights (IPRs) in Pakistan and bridges the gap between legislations and practical implementation. The importance of IPRs for promoting innovation, growth and development of a business, leads the research to examine the relationship between enforcement, awareness, strength of legal framework and technological adoption and the effectiveness of IPRs and how that in turn leads to positive business and economic outcome. The survey design was quantitative cross-sectional. Structured questionnaires were used to get the data from 203 respondents, out of whom entrepreneurs, legal consultants and IT professionals were involved. To test the hypothesized relationships between constructs, SEM with SmartPLS 4.0 was used. Standard statistical procedures were employed to establish extent to which the reliability, validity and model fitness were established. The analysis also shows that a combination of an enhanced IPR effectiveness and business growth (R² = 0.69) and an enhanced economic growth (R² = 0.58) are positively induced by enforcement and technological adoption. In fact, the strength of legal framework was weak in influencing IPRs, thus the gap between policy and practice. Only the link between the legal framework and IPR was not supported by all major hypotheses. The unique context in this study delinks IPR dynamics from one of the developed economies to one of the emerging economies, offering immediate role models for policymakers and relevant business groups. More research should be done in the forms of longitudinal models and sector comparisons to continue to study these phenomena. Keywords: Intellectual Property Rights, Enforcement, Technological Adoption, Business Growth, Economic Growth, Structural Equation Modeling