Coercion Starts, Contracts and Competition Seal It: How IP Rules Spread in Developing States

Why Countries Adopt External Laws?

Jean-Frédéric Morin and Edward Richard Gold ask why some developing countries adopt foreign legal rules—specifically intellectual property (IP) protections—even when those rules run counter to their immediate interests. Building on the policy-diffusion literature, the authors emphasize that legal transplantation is not the product of a single force but of multiple, interacting mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms matters for scholars and policymakers who want to explain how legal norms travel across borders and become embedded in domestic law.

An Integrated Model: Four Mechanisms at Work

The article proposes an integrated model that links four causal mechanisms: coercion (external pressure or threats), contractualization (embedding rules in trade and investment contracts), socialization (norms transmitted through professional, bureaucratic, or epistemic networks), and regulatory competition (domestic policy choices driven by comparative advantage or market pressures). Morin and Gold argue these mechanisms do not operate in isolation; coercion often initiates change, but over time contractualization, socialization, and regulatory competition take over and mutually reinforce one another.

How the Claim Is Tested

The authors test their theory with a quantitative analysis of legal transplants in intellectual property law. Their empirical strategy uses an original index of IP protection covering 121 developing countries across more than 14 years to trace changes in domestic legal adoption and to assess the relative and joint roles of the four mechanisms identified.

What They Find

• Evidence is consistent with coercion as a common initiator of IP transplantation in developing countries.
• Over time, coercion’s direct influence diminishes while contractualization, socialization, and regulatory competition become the primary drivers sustaining and deepening IP adoption.
• These later mechanisms operate in mutually supportive ways, making single-cause explanations incomplete.

Implications for Theory and Practice

Morin and Gold call for theoretical eclecticism: comprehensive explanations of legal transplantation should recognize multicausality and context-conditionality and pay attention to how causal mechanisms reinforce one another rather than simply ranking their independent contributions. For policymakers, the findings suggest that initial pressure can trigger legal change, but durable adoption depends on contractual and normative integration as well as competitive incentives.