Patent Registration by Latin American Inventors and Applicants

The European Patent Office allows to search patent filing by a number of criteria, including country of inventor and applicant, publication data and classification (the search is for worldwide patent offices).

The following provides ans overview of Latin American (plus Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, French Guiana, Guayana and Suriname) countries in comparison with Spain and Portugal. Both the absolute number of filings and the filings per capita are shown (the data is shown for 2013 and the criteria was that at least one of the applicants and one of the inventors came from the respective country):

The leading country is Uruguay followed by Chile and Trinidad & Tobago. Compared to Portugal and especially Spain, there is still significant catching-up to do in Latin America (noting the Portugal and Spain also have a relatively low patent rate compared to the leading countries). The same information is shown graphically:

For Chile the development since 1990 has been as follows (significant increase since around 2000):

In terms of categories the distribution is as follows: