GTRIC-p is constructed in three steps:
1. For each product category, the seizure percentages for sensitive goods are formed.
2. From these, a counterfeit source factor is established for each industry, based on the industries’ weight in terms of Swedish imports.
3. Based on these factors, the GTRIC-p is formed.
Step 1: Measuring product seizure frequencies
and are, respectively, the seizure and import values of product type (as registered according to the HS on the two-digit level) sold in Sweden from any provenance economy in a given year. The relative seizure frequencies (seizure percentages) of good , denoted below by , is then defined by:
Step 2: Measuring industry-specific counterfeiting factors
is defined as the total registered imports of all sensitive goods into Sweden.
The share of good in Swedish imports, denoted by , is therefore given by:
The counterfeiting factor of product category, denoted by , is then determined as the following.
The counterfeiting factor reflects the sensitivity of product infringements occurring in a particular product category, relative to its share in Swedish imports. These constitute the foundation for forming GTRIC-p.
Step 3: Establishing GTRIC-p
GTRIC-p is constructed from a transformation of the counterfeiting factor; it measures the relative likelihood of different types of product categories being subject to counterfeiting and piracy in Swedish imports. The transformation of the counterfeiting factor is based on two main assumptions:
1. The first (A1) is that the counterfeiting factor of a particular product category is positively correlated with the actual degree of trade in counterfeit and pirated goods covered by that chapter. The counterfeiting factors must thus reflect the real intensity of actual counterfeit trade in the given product categories.
2. The second (A2) acknowledges that the assumption A1 may not be entirely correct. For instance, the fact that infringing goods are detected more frequently in certain categories could imply differences in counterfeiting factors across products merely reflect that some goods are easier to detect than others, or that some goods, for one reason or another, have been specially targeted for inspection. The counterfeiting factors of product categories with lower counterfeiting factors could, therefore, underestimate actual counterfeiting and piracy intensities in these cases.
In accordance with assumption A1 (positive correlation between counterfeiting factors and actual infringement activities) and assumption A2 (lower counterfeiting factors may underestimate actual activities), GTRIC-p is established by applying a positive monotonic transformation of the counterfeiting factor index using natural logarithms. This standard technique of linearisation of a non-linear relationship (in the case of this study, between counterfeiting factors and actual infringement activities) allows the index to be flattened and gives a higher relative weight to lower counterfeiting factors (Verbeek, 2008).
In order to address the possibility of outliers at both ends of the counterfeiting factor index – i.e. some categories may be measured as particularly susceptible to infringement even though they are not, whereas others may be measured as unsusceptible although they are – it is assumed that GTRIC-p follows a left-truncated normal distribution, with GTRIC-p only taking values of zero or above.
The transformed counterfeiting factor is defined as:
Assuming the transformed counterfeiting factor can be described by a left-truncated normal distribution with; then, following Hald (1952), the density function of GTRIC-p is given by:
where is the non-truncated normal distribution for , specified as:
The mean and variance of the normal distribution, here denoted by and , are estimated over the transformed counterfeiting factor index, , and given by and . This enables the calculation of the counterfeit import proneness index (GTRIC-p) across product categories, corresponding to the cumulative distribution function of.