Estimating the Effects of Global Patent Protection in Pharmaceuticals: A Case Study of Quinolones in India

Under the TRIPS agreement, WTO members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals. The debate about the merits of this requirement has been extremely contentious. Many low income economies claim that patent protection for pharmaceuticals will result in substantially higher prices for medicines, with adverse consequences for the health and well-being of their citizens. On the other hand, research-based global pharmaceutical companies, argue that prices are unlikely to rise significantly because most patented products have therapeutic substitutes. In this paper we empirically investigate the basis of these claims. Central to the ongoing debate is the structure of demand for pharmaceuticals in poor economies where, because health insurance coverage is so rare, almost all medical expenses are met out-of-pocket. Using a detailed product-level data set from India, we estimate key price and expenditure elasticities and supply-side parameters for the fluoroquinolones sub-segment of the systemic anti-bacterials (i.e., antibiotics) segment of the Indian pharmaceuticals market. We then use these estimates to carry out counterfactual simulations of what prices, profits, and consumer welfare would have been, had the fluoroquinolone molecules we study been under patent in India as they were in the U.S. at the time. Our results suggest that concerns about the potential adverse welfare effects of TRIPS may have some basis. We estimate that in the presence price regulation the total annual welfare losses to the Indian economy from the withdrawal of the four domestic product groups in the fluoroquinolone sub-segment would be on the order of U.S. $305 million, or about 50$50 million. The overwhelming portion of the total welfare loss therefore derives from the loss of consumer welfare. In contrast, the profit gains to foreign producers in the presence price regulation are estimated to be only around $19.6 million per year.

S-wave quantum entanglement in a harmonic trap

We analyze the quantum entanglement between two interacting atoms trapped in a spherical harmonic potential. At ultra-cold temperature, ground state entanglement is generated by the dominated s-wave interaction. Based on a regularized pseudo-potential Hamiltonian, we examine the quantum entanglement by performing the Schmidt decomposition of low-energy eigenfunctions. We indicate how the atoms are paired and quantify the entanglement as a function of a modified s-wave scattering length inside the trap.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, to be apear in PR

Mass effect in polarization investigation at BEPC/BES and the B-factory

We consider the annihilation process of an electron-positron pair into a pair of heavier fermions when the initial electron and position beams are polarized. By calculating the polarization of the final-state particles, we discuss in detail the effect due to the produced particle masses in the $\tau$-charm energy region at BEPC/BES, and also compare the effect with that at the B-factory. Such a study is useful for the design of possible polarization investigation at the BEPC/BES facility and the B-factory.Comment: 7 latex pages, 4 figure

A Morphological Approach to the Pulsed Emission from Soft Gamma Repeaters

We present a geometrical methodology to interpret the periodical light curves of Soft Gamma Repeaters based on the magnetar model and the numerical arithmetic of the three-dimensional magnetosphere model for the young pulsars. The hot plasma released by the star quake is trapped in the magnetosphere and photons are emitted tangent to the local magnetic field lines. The variety of radiation morphologies in the burst tails and the persistent stages could be well explained by the trapped fireballs on different sites inside the closed field lines. Furthermore, our numerical results suggests that the pulse profile evolution of SGR 1806-20 during the 27 December 2004 giant flare is due to a lateral drift of the emitting region in the magnetosphere.Comment: 7 figures, accepted by Ap

Assessing biogeochemical effects and best management practice for a wheat–maize cropping system using the DNDC model

Contemporary agriculture is shifting from a single-goal to a multi-goal strategy, which in turn requires choosing best management practice (BMP) based on an assessment of the biogeochemical effects of management alternatives. The bottleneck is the capacity of predicting the simultaneous effects of different management practice scenarios on multiple goals and choosing BMP among scenarios. The denitrification–decomposition (DNDC) model may provide an opportunity to solve this problem. We validated the DNDC model (version 95) using the observations of soil moisture and temperature, crop yields, aboveground biomass and fluxes of net ecosystem exchange of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide (N2O), nitric oxide (NO) and ammonia (NH3) from a wheat–maize cropping site in northern China. The model performed well for these variables. Then we used this model to simulate the effects of management practices on the goal variables of crop yields, NO emission, nitrate leaching, NH3 volatilization and net emission of greenhouse gases in the ecosystem (NEGE). Results showed that no-till and straw-incorporated practices had beneficial effects on crop yields and NEGE. Use of nitrification inhibitors decreased nitrate leaching and N2O and NO emissions, but they significantly increased NH3 volatilization. Irrigation based on crop demand significantly increased crop yield and decreased nitrate leaching and NH3 volatilization. Crop yields were hardly decreased if nitrogen dose was reduced by 15% or irrigation water amount was reduced by 25%. Two methods were used to identify BMP and resulted in the same BMP, which adopted the current crop cultivar, field operation schedules and full straw incorporation and applied nitrogen and irrigation water at 15 and 25% lower rates, respectively, than the current use. Our study indicates that the DNDC model can be used as a tool to assess biogeochemical effects of management alternatives and identify BMP