Terroir products and geographical indications: A review on France and Turkey

This study aims to accomplish an economic analysis of the terroir products, regulated under the system of Geographical Indications (GI). Scope of the research, which is designed as a descriptive type of study, covers the economic impacts of GIs upon terroir products markets and regional/ rural developments. Regulatory framework of GIs captures and secures the local products that own certain peculiarities of what GIs necessitate obligatory as an object of intellectual-property rights. To take the current intellectual aura subjugated by the claim of what the unique regulatory mechanism is the competitive market signals, existence of the GIs is too important by itself to setup protective legal system for the local products having collective intellectual property rights in its essence. And studying of the GIs systems is seem to be very appropriate issue for developing critical stand point as an essential task of scientific investigations.Mainstream approach in the field of economy becomes main target of this study by posing the question as follows: what is the meaning of protection for the registered local products as products embedded within their history, geography, space as well as collective labour in the form of abstracted commodities? Highlighting the paradoxical contents of the GIs system, thus, would be considered as one of the originality of this study. Since GIs system requires origin-registered products in the form of locally specific and offers regulatory framework for that product in the form of abstracted commodity.The first chapter of the study discusses the question of why the GIs system should become the justifiable objects of scientific investigations for the field of economy. Main rational behind this question is the fact that mainstream economists systematically ignore and undermine the GIs issue as a very current and popular theme. At the second chapter, GIs system and local products market is taken into consideration by stressing their legal aspects. The third and the last chapter offers analytical efforts to conduct conceptual and concrete levels of the issue by using empirical data generated from the field studies conducted in France and Turkey.