Is EPO more productive than GPTO and JPO?

 I.         Background

The European Patent Office (EPO) has increased the productivity in examinations since 2016 (see e.g., “Boosting performance and quality” of the EPO).

But is the EPO more productive than other patent offices?

So I have compared the examination productivity of the EPO with those of the German Patent and Trademark Office (GPTO) and the Japanese Patent Office (JPO).

 

II.         Material and method

1.         Definition of examination productivity

The examination productivity in this study is defined as the number of completed examinations (decisions for grant and rejection) per an examiner in 2020 and has been calculated by the following formula:

Total number of completed examinations / Total number of examiners in office.

 

2.         Available data (2020) 

2.1. Total number of examiners

    EPO:              4099 (1)

    GPTO:            about 1000 (2)

    JPO:               1883 (3)

 

2.2. Total number of completed examinations

    EPO:              140845 (4)

    GPTO:           41723 (2)

    JPO:              220000 (3)

 

III.        Results

 

IV.       Discussion

Although it must be considered that the JPO examiners do no conduct prior art search by themselves, the examination productivity at the JPO amounting to 116.83 is remarkable, which is by far the highest.

The EPO and GPTO examiners both conduct prior art search by themselves so that the EPO and GPTO examiners should have comparable working conditions. Nevertheless, the GPTO examiner has a higher  examination productivity (41.72) than the EPO examiner (34.36).

The examination before the GPTO is famous for being slow, but this figure indicates that the GPTO examiners work more productive than the EPO examiners.

 

V.        Source

(1) https://documents.epo.org/projects/babylon/eponet.nsf/0/66A405546212DDF4C12586FC00330A90/$FILE/social_report_2020_en.pdf

(2) https://www.dpma.de/docs/dpma/veroeffentlichungen/jahresberichte/jahresbericht2020.pdf

(3) https://www.jpo.go.jp/resources/report/nenji/2021/index.html

(4) The EPO does not publish the number of completed examinations any more. Thus, the number was obtained from EP bulletin search (https://www.epo.org/searching-for-patents/legal/bulletin/ep-bulletin-search.html) by query commando “PSDP=2020* or PCRF=2020*”.