The role of Patent on Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence in Vietnam

Purpose: In the period of international integration, how is the implementation of intellectual property regulation in developing countries? Do intellectual property rights help attract more Foreign direct investment (FDI)? This study aims to show the effect of intellectual property rights, reflect in the number of patent registered (Patent distribution into two components: Patent_residents and Patent_non-residents) on FDI attraction in Vietnam. Research design, data and methodology: Using Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model for the data collected from 1990 to 2018 with EViews version 9 software. Conclusions: The results indicate that the number of patent protection has a positive effect on FDI in both short term and long term. In particular, only patent registration of foreign individuals and organizations has a significant positive effect on attracting FDI, while that of Vietnamese patents is not statistically significant. From the results of this study, we provide some recommendations to help attract FDI based on raising awareness of intellectual property rights: Increase international cooperation for innovation to learn and encourage patent; Improve the capacity of inventing as well as the ability to register patents of Vietnamese people; Government agencies are tasked to support and review registration procedures; Encouraging patent registration based on the patent.