Health policy as industrial policy: Brazil in comparative perspective

Ken Shadlen has a new article in the journal Politics & Society, part of a special issue on the topic of “Rewarding Regulation in Latin America

Learning from India? A new approach to secondary pharmaceutical patents

LSE’s Kenneth Shadlen asks whether a recent Indian Supreme Court decision on pharmaceutical patents will make the country’s patent laws more effective, and how the decision may affect global access to affordable medicines

Debating Patents and Drug Prices: Trade Agreements and the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Professor Ken Shadlen and co-authors challenge a recent article in Foreign Affairs that claimed to show that trade agreements with the USA have not affected the price of patented drugs in developing countries

Coalitions and compliance: the political economy of pharmaceutical patents in Latin America

Coalitions and Compliance examines how international changes can reconfigure domestic politics. Since the late 1980s, developing countries have been subject to intense pressures regarding intellectual property rights. These pressures have been exceptionally controversial in the area of pharmaceuticals. Historically, fearing the economic and social costs of providing private property rights over knowledge, developing countries did not allow drugs to be patented. Now they must do so, an obligation with significant implications for industrial development and public health. This book analyses different forms of compliance with this new imperative in Latin America, comparing the politics of pharmaceutical patenting in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Coalitions and Compliance focuses on two periods of patent politics: initial conflicts over how to introduce drug patents, and then subsequent conflicts over how these new patent systems function. In contrast to explanations of national policy choice based on external pressures, domestic institutions, or Presidents' ideological orientations, this book attributes cross-national and longitudinal variation to the ways that changing social structures constrain or enable political leaders' strategies to construct and sustain supportive coalitions. The analysis begins with assessment of the relative resources and capabilities of the transnational and national pharmaceutical sectors, and these rival actors' efforts to attract allies. Emphasis is placed on two ways that social structures are transformed so as to affect coalition-building possibilities: how exporters fearing the loss of preferential market access may be converted into allies of transnational drug firms, and differential patterns of adjustment among state and societal actors that are inspired by the introduction of new policies. It is within the changing structural conditions produced by these two processes that political leaders build coalitions in support of different forms of complianc

Intellectual Property, Access to Medicines, and Health – Ken Shadlen

Professor Ken Shadlen tells us about his editorial role in the latest special issue of Studies in Comparative International Development

Intellectual property, access to medicines, and health: new research horizons

In this introduction we briefly review the literature on intellectual property rights and access to medicines, identifying two distinct generations of research. The first generation analyzes the origins of new intellectual property rules, in particular the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), and the significance of TRIPS to developing countries. The second generation examines national-level experiences, as countries adjust their laws and practices to conform to TRIPS. Based on the insights provided by the articles in the special issue, we contribute to the second generation by considering a pair of overarching sets of issues. First, we highlight the domestic political challenges that affect how countries go about implementing their new obligations under TRIPS. We argue that alliances and coalitions are necessary to underpin the use of policy instruments designed to conform to TRIPS while taking into account local conditions and needs, and we present insights that allow us to understand why alliances and coalitions are difficult to construct and sustain in this area. Second, we explain why policies that many countries adopt in response to TRIPS often do not generate their desired or intended outcomes. In the last section of the introduction we review the articles that appear in this special issue

Rethinking developmental policy space in a fragmented trade regime

Shamel Azmeh and Ken Shadlen explore the concerning rule breaking threatening the future of the multilateral trade regime

Drug patenting in India: looking back andlooking forward

It has now been 20 years since the TRIPS Agreement, which established minimum standards for intellectual property (IP) regulation, came into force. Its implementation in India has been controversial, and in particular Section 3(d), a provision designed to restrict the grant of “secondary” patents, has been pinpointed as making it difficult to obtain pharmaceutical patents. Ken Shadlen and Bhaven Sampat suggest that paying so much attention to 3(d) may be misplaced. They argue that another, more fundamental, aspect of TRIPS implementation in India, the timing of the country’s adoption of pharmaceutical patents, is more important than 3(d) for understanding the current patenting landscape. And because the effects of timing are transitional, in the future it may be less difficult to obtain patents in India than is widely thought