The Costs of Obtaining and Maintaining a Patent in the BRICS Economies
There is soccer fever in the air. With less than a month to go before the kick-off of the quadrennial FIFA World Cup, soccer frenzy has gripped the participating nations. While the friendly wolf Zabivaka™, the official Mascot of the tournament, gets ready to welcome the world to Russia for this extravaganza, we turn the spotlight to the costs of filing a patent application, obtaining a patent, and maintaining the patent in the member countries of “BRICS”. BRICS is an organization that includes the World Cup host, in addition to the five-time champion, Brazil.
The BRICS Story
BRICS is an acronym for an association of five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The building block for BRICS was laid more than a decade-and-a-half ago. In a paper that he authored in 2001, Jim O’Neill (the then-Chief Economist at Goldman Sachs) coined the term BRIC, labeling the first four economies as “emerging superstars most likely to dominate the 21st century globalized economy” (Ian Bremmer; 2017), with South Africa to be added later.
