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Abstract
The U.S. Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA) of 1970 was meant to strengthen
intellectual property protection for plant breeders. A model of investment under partial
excludability is developed, leading to the hypotheses that any increase in excludability or
appropriability of the returns to invention, attributable to the PVPA, would lead to
increases in investment or efficiency gains in varietal R&D, improved varietal quality, and
enhanced royalties. These hypotheses are tested in an economic analysis of the effects of
the PVPA on wheat genetic improvement. The PVPA appears to have contributed to
increases in public expenditures on wheat variety improvement, but private-sector
investment in wheat breeding does not appear to have increased. Moreover, econometric
analyses indicate that the PVPA has not caused any increase in experimental or
commercial wheat yields. However, the share of U.S. wheat acreage sown to private
varieties has increased–from 3 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in the 1990s. These findings
indicate that the PVPA has served primarily as a marketing tool with little impact on
excludability or appropriability.