Search the archive.

Small businesses are usually touted as the driving force behind economic growth in modern societies. Throughout the world, politicians earnestly argue that small businesses are the backbone of the economy. In America, there is even an administration dedicated to building the capabilities of small businesses known as the “Small Business Administration.” The SBA oversees a dazzling suite of services to small businesses and is strangely insulated from criticisms.

Republicans and libertarian commentators in the media have upbraided the EXIM Bank for fostering crony capitalism. Generally, right-leaning economists scrutinize subsidies and special privileges, but despite the benefits accrued to small businesses – they remain a venerated symbol of American capitalism. Few seriously question their impact on economic growth or contribution to innovation. Instead, it is automatically assumed that small businesses generate prosperity.

We emphasize that our study does not imply that the U.S. patent system is optimal, or even net-welfare enhancing, and so should not be reformed. Rather, our findings alter the balance of evidence available to those considering a major revamp of the system by highlighting the real benefits of patents, particularly for startups. In addition to informing the current debate on patent reform, our study provides micro-evidence on the mechanisms through which institutions that secure property rights alleviate information frictions and stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship—activities that underpin modern macroeconomic growth models such as Aghion and Howitt (1992) and Acemoglu and Akcigit (2012).

[Bjørn, “Food security: the seed of solution is already here,” NATO Review, 2-18-2011, , accessed 7-22-2021]

Several large-scale surveys that have looked at the effect of climate change on agricultural production and the global food trade system have four crucial findings in common. First, they envision a large increase in agricultural output – more than a doubling of cereal production over the coming century. In the words of one modeling team: “Globally, land and crop resources, together with technological progress, appear to be sufficient to feed a world population of about 9 billion people in 2080.” The most pessimistic models, expecting the most pessimistic climate impacts, expect a total reduction of agricultural production of 1.4% compared to a scenario without any climate change. Second, the impact of global warming on agricultural production will probably be negative, but in total very modest. The most pessimistic models, expecting the most pessimistic climate impacts, expect a total reduction of agricultural production of 1.4% compared to a scenario without any climate change. The most optimistic model forecasts a net increase in agricultural production from global warming of 1.7%. To put these numbers in perspective, the average growth rate for agriculture over the past 30 years was about 1.7. Third, while there will be little change globally, this is not true regionally. In general terms, global warming has a negative impact on developing nations’ agriculture but a positive impact on developed nations’ agriculture. This cruel reality is because temperature increases are helpful for farmers in high latitudes (bringing longer growth seasons, multiple crops, and higher yields) but mean lower productivity for those in tropical countries. [Lomborg_cropfield_2.jpg] In worst-case scenarios, this will mean a 7% decrease in yield in the developing world and a 3% increase in the developed world. This is an issue that we must address, but we should also note the bigger picture: total production even in the least developed countries is expected to rise by about 270%. Over the coming century, developing nations will inevitably become more dependent on food imports from developed countries. This is not primarily a global warming phenomenon: even without global warming, imports for least developed countries would double over the century because of demographics. Global warming causes the import increase to go from about 100% to %110-140%. We should keep in mind that developing country consumers in 2080 will be considerably better off than they are today. One modeling team points out that future developing nation consumers “are largely separated from agricultural production processes, dwelling in cities and earning incomes in the non-agricultural sectors. As in today’s developed countries, consumption levels depend largely on food prices and incomes rather than on changes in domestic agricultural production.” Fourth, overall, global warming will be responsible for up to 28 million more malnourished people in the most likely scenario. (Other scenarios show lower impacts, ranging down to global warming causing an overall reduction in the number of malnourished people by 28 million). The extent of hunger depends less on climate and more on economics It is important to put this into context. The world now has about 925 million malnourished. Over the coming century we will add at least 2-3 billion more people, yet it is likely that towards the end of the century, there will be ‘only’ about 108 million people starving.

In his testimony, Brunkow also highlighted the reforms needed regarding the Endangered Species Act, duplicative regulatory burdens, labor regulations, the need for cost/benefit analysis and transparency in the regulatory process itself.

National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) past president John Weber, a pork producer from Dysart, Iowa, also testified, noting, “Regulations add to the cost of doing business.”

Across all models, we find relatively weak and insignificant effects for domestic food production and we also note that the sign of the coefficients shifts between outcome types. In this sense, table 1 implicitly contrasts both claims that political violence is more prevalent when basic needs are met (Salehyan and Hendrix 2014) and claims that agricultural income shocks increase civil conflict risk (von Uexkull 2014). The results are consistent with Koubi et al (2012) and van Weezel (2015), however, who conclude that rainfall—a significant determinant of yields in SSA—has little impact on conflict either directly or through economic performance. The covariate that best and most consistently explains temporal variation in political violence is the time-lagged conflict incidence indicator. Models 1–2 show that a new civil conflict is unlikely to break out if another one is already ongoing in the same country whereas Models 3–6, which capture the occurrence of less organized conflict, demonstrate that violence begets violence. Coups d’état (Models 7–8) exhibit a comparatively weak temporal correlation pattern in our data and are generally regarded as a highly unpredictable phenomenon (Luttwak 1979). Next, we estimate the same set of models on a subsample of 14 countries in SSA where rainfall has a large and significant positive effect on food production (figure 2(b); see supplementary information, section B for details). To better capture the influence of climate variability and reduce concerns with endogeneity, we further replace the standard OLS model with twostage instrumental variable regression. The first stage in this model estimates the joint influence of annual rainfall (linear and squared terms) and temperature (linear) on contemporaneous food production. This effect then constitutes the exogenous instrument for food production in the second stage. The results are reported in table 2. Mirroring the results presented above, we fail to uncover a robust signal for agricultural performance, although the sign of the coefficient for food production now remains negative in seven of the eight specifications. Food production shocks may have different consequences depending on the socioeconomic context, so next we consider a series of interactive relationships. Specifically, we investigate the joint effect of food production and (i) low level of development, (ii) extent of discriminatory political system, and (iii) economic dependence on agriculture; three conditions whereby loss of income from agriculture might constitute a particular challenge to society. To model these interactions, we include time-varying regressors instead of country-fixed effects where (i) is represented by infant mortality rate (IMR; World Bank 2014), (ii) is captured using the Ethnic Power Relations v.1.1 data (Cederman et al 2010), while (iii) uses an index of agricultural contribution to GDP (World Bank 2014). Moreover, to preserve focus on temporal dynamics, food production is now operationalized as yearly deviation from the country mean, 1961–2009. We use additive inverse deviation values to ensure theoretical consistency among the components in the interaction terms. All models control for (ln) population size, conflict history, and a common time trend, and models without IMR and agricultural dependence additionally control for (ln) GDP per capita. The results are presented in table 3. Again, we are unsuccessful in establishing a consistent covariation pattern between agricultural performance and political violence. Interpreting the combined effect of interaction terms with continuous parameters is inherently difficult but figure 4 shows that food production is insignificantly related to all conflict outcomes across levels of socioeconomic development for all three interaction terms. The sole exception is the result in Model 24, where lower food production in highly discriminatory societies is negatively associated with non-state conflict. This result would seem to contradict the standard scarcity thesis (Homer-Dixon 1999) although it is consistent with observations that conflict is more prevalent during surplus years (Witsenburg and Adano 2009, Salehyan and Hendrix 2014). Mirroring earlier research, ethnopolitical exclusion is strongly related to higher civil conflict risk, but not necessarily to other forms of political violence. Infant mortality rate and economic dependence on agriculture appear largely irrelevant. While this may come as a surprise, recall that most countries in SSA are characterized by underdevelopment and a large agricultural sector, implying that the variation in values on these indicators is modest. Large parameter uncertainties and p-values above the conventional significance threshold (5%) may disguise substantively important effects (Ward et al 2010). Accordingly, as a final assessment, we conduct a set of out-of-sample simulations and compare predictions for models with and without food production. The models are estimated on a subset of the full sample, in this case all years before 2000, and the estimated effects are then used to predict conflict outcomes out of sample, i.e., the 2000–09 period. Figure 5 shows the predicted values from four pairs of models that are specified similarly to Models 17, 20, 23, and 26, except for the shorter time period and the fact that one model in each pair drops the food production deviation variable. For civil conflict and social unrest, the models generate very similar predictions, signaling that agricultural performance adds little to the models’ predictive power. There is more spread in the predictions for the remaining two outcome categories. Puzzlingly, the model without food production performs better in both cases—i.e., the Receiver Operating Characteristics curves have higher ‘Area Under the Curve’ scores. We hesitate to put too much emphasis on the ROC tests, given the rareness of the outcomes(notably Models 17 and 26) and the relatively small training samples (Models 20 and 23), but nonetheless the patterns observed in the out-of-sample simulations substantiate the regression results reported above; fluctuations in agricultural output explain little of the observed variation in political violence in post-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa. 5. Concluding remarks Emerging evidence suggests that food price shocks are associated with an increase in social unrest (Smith 2014, Bellemare 2015, Hendrix and Haggard 2015, Weinberg and Bakker 2015). Yet, the robust ‘non-finding’ presented here implies that so-called ‘food riots’ play out largely isolated from climate-sensitive production dynamics in the affected countries. Likewise, claims that adverse weather and harvest failure drive contemporary violence in Africa (e.g., Hsiang et al 2013, IFPRI 2015) are not supported by our analysis. Instead, social protest and rebellion during times of food price spikes may be better understood as reactions to poor and unjust government policies, corruption, repression, and market failure (e.g., Bush 2010, Buhaug and Urdal 2013, Sneyd et al 2013, Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2015).

The USPTO has taken another step toward implementing fee adjustments in January 2025, by publishing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (RPRM) on April 3, 2024. The NPRM stands by most of the significant fee adjustments it proposed in April 2023, with a few changes made in response to input from the Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC). Stakeholders will want to plan ahead for across-the-board fee increases of about 5% and more significant targeted fee adjustments (and new fees) that could impact patent prosecution strategies.

Proposed Fee Adjustments 

The US Patent and Trademark Office can continue operating for about three months if the government shuts down because Congress fails to enact funding legislation by Saturday night’s deadline.

The agency would draw from its $1.04 billion operating reserves, which should cover about three months of patent operating expenses and slightly more than four months of trademark operating expenses, according to a submission it made to Congress in March. That would allow for full staff and operations to continue—at least temporarily—including at the administrative tribunals that hear challenges to patent validity and resolve trademark disputes.

While other non-essential agencies are furloughing staff during a shutdown, the USPTO keeps their staff working, at least due to operating reserves (ORs) funding on hand and national security concerns. Even though the Department of Commerce is the parent agency of the USPTO, the USPTO submits budget proposals including detailed accounting directly to Congress.[6] Furthermore, the IPEC submits an Annual IP Report to Congress, bringing together the advancement of efforts in IP by every major U.S. Agency, including property enforcement strategy and related efforts undertaken by departments and agencies.[7] In sum, the United States takes IP seriously, as a matter of national security.

Due in part to promoting confidence in the U.S. IP system, the USPTO plans ahead for shutdowns and submits detailed Budget Reports to Congress, including projected ORs in case of a shutdown (see: https://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/USPTO-FY2024-Congressional-Budget-Submission.pdf).

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office saw record numbers of new trademark applications filed in 2021.During 2021, the USPTO reported over a 25% increase in applications. See USPTO Performance and Accountability Report 2021, available here. Such a steep increase is thought to come from both foreign and domestic filings, with those from China outpacing growth from both U.S. applicants and applicants from other countries.

As a result of the surge in new filings, there is now a backlog of trademark applications causing significant delays at the USPTO. Applicants filing in the United States should expect longer wait times for the initial processing and examination of their application, subsequent processing of responses to Office Actions, and the review of post-registration filings.

Trademark wait times at the USPTO are at an all-time high, with the backlog being blamed variously on the pandemic, a shrinking federal government workforce or rampant fraud committed by opportunistic filers.

While this is naturally a point of stress for practitioners and applicants alike, it can be leveraged with smart, strategic thinking.

This is a common question from brand owners, and an important one. After all, registering a trademark is a significant step in protecting a brand.

Over the past few years, it has been taking longer and longer to get a trademark registration from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”).

The frustration being caused by the backlog is also being felt at the USPTO as well. As WTR recently reported, a former examining attorney revealed that “demoralisation has become a big issue for PTO examiners” – with three key issues raised that the registry must address: rising to the logistical challenges imposed by covid-19 restrictions, managing the ongoing delays (and concerns over fraud) caused by the influx of trademark applications, and maintaining (or raising) staff morale. Positively, though, the source said that USPTO management “are certainly cognisant of how bad it has gotten”.

Indeed, that awareness of the issue was confirmed through a recent blog post penned by USPTO trademark commissioner David Gooder. In it, he explained how trademark applications “have surged to unprecedented levels” since late last year – acknowledging that the “backlog is increasing”. He added: “As a result, applicants may have to wait longer for initial processing of their application, receiving an office action, processing of responses to office actions, and reviewing of post-registration filings.”

The USPTO trademark backlog reaches 900,000 classes for the first time. Follows massive rise in new applications being received by the registry. Experts reveal the impact the increased examination wait time is having.

The backlog of pending trademarks at the USPTO has surpassed 900,000 for the first time, highlighting the monumental challenge facing the registry. In response, USPTO trademark commissioner David Gooder is pledging “increased productivity” to tackle the backlog – although experts tell WTR that, while action may be being taken, “it is not clear that the numbers are getting better”.

The dominance of Asian tech companies in the U.S. patent space and the impacts of growing backlogs in patent examination were major takeaways from the Top 50 U.S. Patent Assignees and Global 250 Lists, published by IFI CLAIMS on January 9. The patent database developer also released a Top 10 Fastest Growing Technologies list reflecting the strong global popularity of smoking, whether via electrical device or in traditional cigarette form.

IBM Cedes Further Ground Among Top 50 U.S. Patent Assignees

Many U.S. efforts are directed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the federal agency charged with granting patents.81 For an inventor to receive U.S. patent protection on her [their] invention, she [they] must start the process by filing an application with the USPTO.82 This begins a back-and-forth between the applicant and the assigned patent examiner, who sends the applicant “Office Actions” containing the examiner’s conclusions regarding the patentability of the invention.83 The applicant may respond to these Office Actions, for example, by amending the invention’s claims to limit them to patentable subject matter, or by raising legal or technical arguments to counter the examiner’s reasoning.84 The process generally concludes when the claimed invention receives a “final rejection” or an “allowance” from the examiner.85 If the examiner issues a Notice of Allowance on a utility application, the inventor is granted a patent, which confers a 20-year exclusive right to prevent others from practicing the invention.86

The structure and nature of the patent process leads to many headaches for applicants and inventors. First, applicants must pay a variety of fees, including fees for filing, examination, search, issuance, and more.87 Even before filing, inventors often seek the help of a patent agent or attorney in drafting the application, and many choose to retain counsel to handle the entirety of the prosecution of the application. Second, the patent-granting process may be excruciatingly slow. As of January 2024, applicants must wait an overage of over twenty months before receiving a substantive response from the Patent Office.88 Patents are generally “pending” for around two years, and the USPTO has a current backlog of over 775,000 unexamined patent applications.89

We also estimate the effects of delays in reviewing patent applications that are eventually approved. Here, we combine exogenous variation arising from two sources: the time it takes to assign patent applications to examiners and individual examiners’ historical review speeds. We find that delays adversely affect startups’ employment and sales growth, subsequent innovation, and probability of going public or being acquired. Together with our evidence showing that patents facilitate access to VC funding, these findings suggest that the negative effects of review delays are transmitted via a reduced chance of securing growth capital. When delays are substantial, their effects on startups can be as adverse as those of patent denials.

Delays matter because patents matter. Patents affect decisions about which businesses get investments, which products get launched, whether a business gets off the ground, and other key decisions. Without the security provided by a patent, these things often simply don’t happen.

Here are three ways in which patent backlog hurts a country’s economy

This definition of “national security” is broader than just the defense industry or military-related efforts; it also could encompass the very ability of a nation to ensure economic well-being, public health, and protection of a nation's key infrastructure. Supply chain disruptions cause general economic disruption and key commodity shortages, which then in turn can, in fact, drive aggressive national behavior and international instability. And ironically, this reactive aggressive national behavior can happen even if the health of a national economy itself depends upon continued international economic interdependence. Indeed, this very interdependence can create vulnerabilities. So a systematic effort, cutting across agencies and public and private sectors, could be one way to ensure these vulnerabilities are understood and mitigated. Supply Chain Disruption and Conflict Dispersed supply chains develop because actors find it's economically advantageous to seek the least-expensive and most-productive sources of supply. These dispersed chains develop for good reasons, but they create complicated interdependencies whose risks and vulnerabilities are sometimes not even understood, let alone mitigated. While the reasons for creating these chains lie largely with private interest, the effects of disruption—which can come from sources ranging from malign human action to natural disaster—are rarely localized. When shortages occur in one industry, the disruptions in one area nearly always spill into adjacent companies and sectors. Whole economies feel the impact, not isolated actors. The impact on vulnerable populations may be particularly dire. Supply chain disruptions do not just create higher prices and shortages among high-end consumer products, such as cars. They also affect more-basic commodities such as generic drugs or energy, increasing the cost of living and the provision of basic needs.

This kind of disruption can create instability more generally, promoting conditions for conflict between and within nations. For the most part, nations try to maintain access to markets and resources by peaceful means such as stockpiling, direct investment in partner nations, and use of other financial incentives. However, there is no guarantee that such competition will remain peaceful. As affluent nations and individuals can find ways to mitigate shortages, they may create blocs of “haves” and “have nots,” where some actors have enough but others cannot meet basic needs. “Haves” may find ways to more directly change distribution, most likely at the expense of other “have nots.” Or “have” nations may try to forcefully safeguard what they have gained and work to exclude competitors. In all these cases, the actors are facing shortages, occasioned by interdependence, and seeking security for themselves in ways that actually promote wider international systemic instability. Escalation of Conflict In some cases, supply chain disruptions can have an even more-direct impact than general disruption, causing shortages of commodities the nation must have to ensure national security. This kind of disruption can go beyond matters of justice, equity, and general prosperity to threatening a nation's very ability to defend itself and look after its citizens. Some examples are pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment, energy, food, raw materials used in manufacturing, and semiconductors used in multiple different systems including military applications. Such shortages can make the need for a national government to act more dire and immediate and thus raise the risk of conflict. In some cases, particular types of raw materials only exist in certain places, so shifting to more-secure sources isn't even possible.

Ukraine is only a small part of the picture. A more disturbing challenge is the state of the industrial base for one or more future wars, including in the Indo-Pacific. With growing competition between the United States and China—along with continuing threats from Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorist groups—the U.S. military needs to be prepared to fight at least one major war, if not two.27

The requisite capabilities for fighting are essential for a credible deterrent. There are two main types of deterrence in the context of this study. Deterrence by denial involves preventing an adversary from taking an action by making the action infeasible or unlikely to succeed, thus denying the adversary confidence in achieving its objectives. Deterrence by punishment involves preventing an adversary from taking an action by imposing severe costs if the action occurs.28 In both cases, a strong U.S. industrial base—with sufficient munitions stockpiles and weapons systems—is critical for deterring Chinese action.

Small businesses make up 99.9 percent of all businesses in the U.S. and more than half of all American employees work for a small business. They’re a critical contributor to our national security: last year alone the Department of Defense spent $83 billion on small business prime contracts and nearly 25 percent of DoD’s prime contracts go to small businesses. 

Sounds like a great success story, however despite their immense value, the number of small businesses in the U.S. Defense Industrial Base has declined by 40 percent in the last decade. That’s both an economic and national security risk for our nation as we seek to strengthen our domestic supply chains, increase competition, and reduce dependency on single and foreign sources of supply.