Patent examination at the State Intellectual Property Office in China

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the institutional background of patent examination and its duration in China. The number of patent applications filed at the Chinese State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) has grown tremendously in recent decades; by 2009, SIPO had become the world's third largest patent office. We find that the average grant lag in 1990–2002 was 4.71 years, with considerable variation across 30 different technology areas. We also empirically analyze the determinants of the grant lags at the SIPO. Using a multivariate duration analysis of the population of 443,533 SIPO patent applications from 1990 to 2002, we find that, even after controlling for other important determinants of grant lags, Chinese applicants achieved faster patent grants than their non-Chinese counterparts.