The 3 approaches to strengthening patent systems are enhanced enforcement to reduce corruption, complying with international conventions, and enhancing patent office operations.

Conversely, there are but six countries for which the Cortez Index value far exceeds their PPP/capita rank, Ghana, Jordan, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, and Nicaragua.126 This group requires further evaluation.127 Re-computing the correlations with the fifteen natural resource-dependent countries excluded does little to change the figures. The correlation between the Cortez Index128 and PPP/capita is then r = 0.88 while between PPP/capita and CPI129 r = 0.90, and r = 0.95 between the Index and CPI. Exploring further, the correlation between the CPI and the WEF measure of judicial independence130 is r = 0.76. It is of no great surprise that removing fifteen countries from a list of 148 does not change the underlying relationships. But these correlations do emphasize the apparent existence of fundamental determinant relationships among this data.131 As was discussed above,132 countries have available three distinct approaches to strengthening patent systems: enhancing enforcement by reducing corruption, joining/complying with international conventions, and, finally, enhancing patent office operations. Due to the particularly strong correlations existing between several measures of corruption and the available patent indexes, as a working hypothesis corruption/enforceability of IP rights is identified as the fundamental causal factor among the several indexes. That is, the level of corruption/governing efficiency is hypothesized to be the principal determinant of countries stronger patent index scores, and subsequently moving to higher income levels. Alternative explanations are explored further below,133 but as will be seen, the mechanism chosen by countries to enhance patent rights is central here to identifying the direction of causality. First though, we examine in more depth the effects of corruption on patent systems and enforcement.