Issues of Transboundary Trade in the Remanufacturing Industry: A Critical Analysis
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There is a rise in manufacturing industries, especially in the developing countries such as China and India, along with a constant inflow of scrap waste from developed to developing countries for intentions of repurposing them. Such countries are flourishing in the spaces of fast paced innovation with the intention to be on the same par in the sphere of R&D as the developed countries. However, what is often overlooked is how weak to non-existent IPR laws have created a lacunae in the waste handling capacity of aforementioned developing countries. Currently developing countries the likes of India does not have any stringent laws that would facilitate legal remanufacturing of patented products, which if effectively done, is likely to fetch huge profits for India in return for our manpower. Such aforementioned countries have kept a regime of weak IPR laws on purpose to facilitate easy technological spill over through reverse engineering, knowledge diffusion etc. However weak laws also create issues of legal grey areas in terms of zero laws that refuse to deal with upcoming issues in the present context. Thus, lack of effective laws have stopped developing countries’ economic growth as these countries are barred from using its resources to repurpose remanufactured goods due to reasons of stringent patent laws (international or otherwise). Moreover developing countries are suspicious of enacting proper laws in that regard as developed countries have a tendency of using developing countries as a dumping ground for their waste. This paper does a critical analysis of the various lacunae in different patent regime and trade laws of a selected few countries associated with effective remanufacturing of patented products. This paper does a comparative analysis of the patent and trade law regime of developed countries such as USA, UK and upcoming developing countries such as China, Japan. It further makes a review of the best possible legal implementations that should be introduced to benefit both parties of developed and developing countries in the aforementioned regard. This paper also deals with the essence of how much developing countries lack in acknowledging the presence of a circular economy and how they could strike a balance between keeping deliberate weak IPR and implementing strong patent and trade laws in certain aspects to facilitate the end goal of boosting the developing country
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Trade