Living in a poisonous World. The Geography of Inventions in the Pesticide Industry

Abstract

The invention of dark innovations, which we define as technologies that possess intrinsic features that can cause significant harm to humans and their ecosystems, is expected to shift from high income democratic countries to lower income authoritarian countries which are then blamed for being pollution havens. We take patents in the pesticide industry as a possible space for dark innovations and find that, while pesticides patents boomed in China after 2005, the progressive, democratic, high-income California still retains a leadership in the invention of highly toxic pesticides, which outperform Chinese patents also in terms of geographical scope.

Keywords: Patents, Pesticides, Persistent organic pollutants (POP), regions, United States, China.

JEL Classification: O30, O31, O33