from China, India, and South Africa combined was on par with the number of applications from Australia.

By the late 1990s, an average of 14.5 percent of patents in any OECD country were owned or co-owned by foreign residents, compared to 10.7 percent in the early 1990s, indicating an increasingly global and internationally linked inventive performance. Smaller countries and large non-OECD member countries tend to have higher percentages of patents with foreign coinventors. For example, in 1999-2000, Luxembourg had the greatest share of EPO patent applications with foreign coinventors (56 percent), followed by Singapore and Russia (both 43 percent). The United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries with large numbers of patents tend to have a lower share of patents with foreign coinventors; the United States, Germany, and Japan ranked 28th, 29th, and 33rd, respectively, in terms of the percentage of EPO patent applications in 1999-2000 with at least one foreign coinventor.

The number of patent applications filed at the national patent office of Brazil (INPI) and the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPI) has increased rapidly over the past decade. In Brazil the total number of INPI applications filed in 2000 increased to 16,700, up from an estimated 7,000 in 1991. Most of those applications were filed by inventors from the United States (30.5 percent), European Union (34.8 percent), Brazil (17.8 percent), and Japan (5.7 percent). In China the total number of patent applications filed at SIPI increased from about 12,000 in 1985 to nearly 60,000 in 2000. Again, most of the patent activity in China is from foreign investors (Japan, 20.6 percent of total patent activity; European Union, 16.8 percent; United States, 14.9 percent; and Korea, 3.6 percent), although domestic applications (i.e., from Chinese inventors) have shown a dramatic 15 percent annual growth rate. By 2000, nearly 40 percent of all SIPI patent applications were domestic.

Although all technology fields have experienced patent growth over the past 10 years, biotechnology and information and computer technology (ICT) have grown most rapidly. For example, between 1991 and 2000, biotechnology and ICT patent applications to the EPO increased 10.9 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively, compared to 6.9 percent growth overall. The United States showed particularly rapid growth in biotechnology patent activity, with 9.6 percent of its EPO patents in the field of biotechnology, compared to only 4.2 percent of the European Union’s EPO patents and 3.5 percent for Japan.

The United States (45.1 percent), European Union (33.4 percent), and Japan (11.3 percent) have the greatest shares of biotechnology EPO patents. Within the European Union, Germany holds the most EPO biotechnology patents (12.4 percent), followed by the United Kingdom (5.8 percent), France (4.9 percent), Netherlands (3.0 percent), Denmark (1.7 percent), and