Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Southeast Asian economies pay billions of dollars every year for the use of foreign intellectual property while producing comparatively little patentable innovation of their own, and very little in environmental technology. This study reviews two decades of evidence on this imbalance. The review is built on an open-data decision support pipeline that fuses bulk patent statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization with development and governance indicators from the World Bank, and it compares eleven Southeast Asian countries against China, South Korea and Japan across four dimensions: patenting capacity, green technology orientation, institutional quality and the intellectual property balance of payments. Four findings stand out. The capacity gap to the benchmarks has widened to between two and four orders of magnitude. The regional green patenting share has remained close to one percent for twenty years while the same share in China rose above 2.7 percent. The region's patent offices serve mostly foreign applicants. Net licensing outflows averaged 13.8 billion dollars per year between 2020 and 2024. The paper connects these observations through an innovation leakage framework, condenses them into a four-tier taxonomy of regional innovation systems, and translates the taxonomy into a tier-specific gap analysis and intervention matrix for national research and development planning. Every figure and table can be regenerated from open data with the scripted pipeline described in the paper, which is itself offered as a low-cost decision support instrument for intellectual property governance aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.</p>