TRIPS implementation and secondary pharmaceutical patenting in Brazil and India

This article compares national approaches toward secondary pharmaceutical patents. Because secondary patents can extend periods of exclusivity and delay generic competition, they can raise prices and reduce access to medicines. Little is known about what measures countries have enacted policies to address applications for secondary pharmaceutical patents, how they function, and whether, in practice, these measures limit secondary patents. We analyze the cases of India and Brazil. We assemble data on pharmaceutical patent applications filed in the two countries, code each application to identify which constitute secondary applications, and examine outcomes for each application in both countries. The data indicate that Brazil is less likely to grant applications than India, but in both countries the measures designed to limit secondary patents are having little direct effect. This suggests, on the one hand, that critics of these policies, such as the transnational pharmaceutical sector and foreign governments, may be more worried than they should be. On the other hand, champions of the policies, such as NGOs and international organizations, may have cause for concern that laws on the books are not having the expected impact on patent outcomes in practice. Our findings also suggest that, at the drug level, the effects of countries’ approaches toward secondary patents need to be understood in the context of their broader approaches toward TRIPS implementation, including when and how they introduced pharmaceutical patents in the 1990s and 2000s

Financing HIV Programming: How Much Should Low- And Middle-Income Countries and their Donors Pay?

Global HIV control funding falls short of need. To maximize health outcomes, it is critical that national governments sustain reasonable commitments, and that international donor assistance be distributed according to country needs and funding gaps. We develop a country classification framework in terms of actual versus expected national domestic funding, considering resource needs and donor financing. With UNAIDS and World Bank data, we examine domestic and donor HIV program funding in relation to need in 84 low- and middle-income countries. We estimate expected domestic contributions per person living with HIV (PLWH) as a function of per capita income, relative size of the health sector, and per capita foreign debt service. Countries are categorized according to levels of actual versus expected domestic contributions, and resource gap. Compared to national resource needs (UNAIDS Investment Framework), we identify imbalances among countries in actual versus expected domestic and donor contributions: 17 countries, with relatively high HIV prevalence and GNI per capita, have domestic funding below expected (median per PLWH $143 and$376, respectively), yet total available funding including from donors would exceed the need ($368 and$305, respectively) if domestic contribution equaled expected. Conversely, 27 countries have actual domestic funding above the expected (medians $294 and$149) but total (domestic+donor) funding does not meet estimated need ($685 and$1,173). Across the 84 countries, in 2009, estimated resource need totaled $10.3 billion, actual domestic contributions$5.1 billion and actual donor contributions $3.7 billion. If domestic contributions would increase to the expected level in countries where the actual was below expected, total domestic contributions would increase to$7.4 billion, turning a funding gap of $1.5 billion into a surplus of$0.8 billion. Even with imperfect funding and resource-need data, the proposed country classification could help improve coherence and efficiency in domestic and international allocations

The Mexican exception: patents and innovation policy in a non-conformist and reluctant middle income country

This article analyzes patent and innovation policies in Mexico. Unlike many developing countries, Mexico has enthusiastically embraced external pressures for stronger patent protection. Yet, also unlike other countries, Mexico has not complemented changes to its patent regime with measures to buttress science, technology and innovative (STI) capabilities. To explain this atypical trajectory, I focus on the shape of political coalitions in the areas of patents and STI policies. The early adoption of a strong patent regime, combined with liberalization and internationalization of the economy, consolidated a coalition based on a low-technological form of integration into the global economy, and the same processes withered away the coalition that might have pushed for an alternative project. Understanding the political underpinnings of Mexico's behavior sheds light on the conditions under which middle-income developing countries may engage in issue leadership and join with other developing countries to shape the international economic architecture

Twenty-five years since TRIPS: Patent policy and international business

In this introduction to the special issue, we take stock of the impact of the TRIPS agreement on international business in the hyper-globalised world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We begin by providing a brief background on TRIPS, putting it in the historical context of international agreements on intellectual property (IP) and then looking at the logic of national patent policies, examining how policies may vary across countries, in theory, and reviewing literature that discusses the factors driving historical variation, in practice. We review the key issues in the domestic politics of implementation as the new rules migrate from the international to national levels. Lastly, we consider the implications of TRIPS for the governance of innovations in industries based on ICT and where ICT has enabled global value chains (GVCs), where the speed and distributed nature of innovation makes IPR simultaneously less effective and more necessary