Park’s index is a bad measure of IPR---conflates protection and enforcement.
Balsmeier ’15 [Benjamin and Julia Delanote; November; Associate professor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Luxembourg; PhD, Economist at the European Investment Bank, where she is principally responsible for the EIB Investment Survey, a large scale survey of corporate investment activities; Journal of Comparative Economics, “Employment growth heterogeneity under varying intellectual property rights regimes in European transition economies: Young vs. mature innovators,” Volume 43, Issue 4]
The resulting IPR index ranges from 0 to 10. A rating of 10 represents the strongest IPR regime and a rating of 0 indicates that there are basically no effective IPRs in the particular country. Most of the studies trying to measure the strength of the intellectual property regime rely solely on the Ginarte-Park Index. This measure has often been criticized as it only takes the enforcement of patent rights represented in law texts into account, i.e. these ‘book’ measures may hardly represent the extent to which patents are actually enforced (Maskus, 2000, Javorcik, 2004). By encompassing and extending the Ginarte-Park Index, the IPR index of the Property Rights Alliance provides a more objective and complete view on the strength of a particular IPR regime. While it is still an approximation of the effective IPR enforcement, it is arguably one of the best available measures directly related to IP. Other available measures of law enforcement, e.g. contract enforcement, are often only weakly related to IP enforcement.