Foreword and acknowledgements

National intellectual property (IP) systems provide a critical policy toolkit for fostering innovation performance and knowledge diffusion. This report is part of a series of country reviews aimed at identifying how national IP systems can better serve these objectives (http://oe.cd/ip-studies). The publication National Intellectual Property Systems, Innovation and Economic Development presents the analytical framework used for these country reviews. The framework is used to analyse the key mechanisms that enable IP systems to support countries’ innovation and development objectives. This allows strengths and weaknesses in the intellectual property system’s contributions to national innovation performance to be identified.