05-06 "Policy Space for Development in the WTO and Beyond: The Case of Intellectual Property Rights"

Global governance in intellectual property (IP) has changed dramatically in the last two decades, and these changes have profound – and worrying – implications for late development. What was once principally an instrument of national policy is now increasingly subject to international disciplines, as the world moves ever-closer to harmonization in the area of IP management. But moving toward harmonization and achieving harmonization are different matters, and it is essential to keep in mind that the former and not the latter describes contemporary arrangements: the trend is toward a reduction in policy space, a feature that many scholars and activists point to with great concern (Gallagher, 2005), but the outcome remains one where countries retain space for autonomous IP management. This paper examines the relationship between IP and development, presenting a framework for assessing IP regimes both cross-nationally and over time. It is then shown how the trend toward harmonization places new and significant restrictions on developing countries’ opportunities for policy innovation in IP management. The implications of harmonization for a range of issues are then considered, including late industrialization, promotion of public health, and protection of biodiversity. The paper shows that the new regulations are most accentuated at the regional and bilateral level. Thus, for all of the concerns that academics and policy analysts have legitimately and rightly expressed over TRIPS, the biggest threat to using IP policy as tool for realizing development objectives comes not so much from the World Trade Organization (WTO) as from bilateral and regional Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) between developed and developing countries. I demonstrate this by examining various aspects of IP policy: over and over, we see that countries that are parties to such PTAs have significantly less autonomy in their management of IP. In the conclusion, a set of policy recommendations are put forth, at both regional and multilateral levels, for restoring countries’ ability to use IP as a tool for economic development. The policy challenges are twofold: developing countries must utilize and exploit the remaining opportunities under TRIPS to use IP management for national development purposes, and developing countries must be careful to avoid bargaining away their remaining rights under PTAs.

07-05 “The Politics of Patents and Drugs in Brazil and Mexico: The Industrial Bases of Health Activism”

This paper analyzes the politics of intellectual property (IP) and public health in Brazil and Mexico. Both countries introduced pharmaceutical patents in the 1990s, to comply with their international obligations. Indeed, both countries’ IP systems were markedly similar in being favorable to the interests of the transnational, innovation-based pharmaceutical sector. Yet since the late 1990s the two countries have diverged in dramatic fashion. In Brazil the response to the high price of drugs and societal demands to reform the IP system has been to make obtaining private ownership over knowledge more difficult and to increase the rights of third parties to access and use knowledge. In Mexico, the response to similar demands has been to raise impediments to third parties’ rights of access and use and effectively extend the periods of protection granted to patent-owners. To explain these differences the paper adopts a political economy approach, analyzing the nature of actors pushing for IP reform and subsequent patterns of alliance formation and political mobilization. In both countries, drug patents, escalating prices, and limited access led to backlash against the IP system, but the two countries demonstrate marked variation in the presence of powerful alliance partners to lend their support to activists clamoring for change. In Brazil, the combination of a strong, interested, and active Ministry of Health and a more autonomous local pharmaceutical sector created a propitious environment for initiatives to reform the IP system. In Mexico, the subordination of the Secretariat of Health and fundamental transformations of the local industrial sector meant that calls to reform the IP system were not well-received. Instead, the reform project in Mexico became commandeered by IP owners and ultimately had the perverse effect of reinforcing and strengthening the system that was being challenged. The paper concludes by underscoring the importance of pharmaceutical industries for development. The findings suggest that the existence of independent pharmaceutical sectors may not just be beneficial for industrial development, but also for promoting public health and pursuing humanitarian goals. The basis of this conclusion is that the key variable in explaining efforts to reform patent systems to increase access to drugs is the presence of an autonomous, national pharmaceutical industry that is available as an alliance partner for those pushing for such reforms. Thus, the key to IP-for-humanitarianism is maintenance of some degree of IP-for-industrialization.

09-01 "Resources, Rules and International Political Economy: The Politics of Development in the WTO"

This paper examines the contemporary politics of intellectual property (IP) and investment in the World Trade Organization (WTO). I examine the underlying and perennial conflicts that pit developing and developed countries against each other in these two areas and the nature of the two agreements reached during the Uruguay Round, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMS). I then analyze developed countries’ efforts to push beyond the TRIPS and TRIMS agreements, and, critically, developing countries’ success in forestalling these efforts. Developing countries have “prevailed” in the current international conflicts over IP and investment not by securing rules that they desire, but rather by preventing the imposition of arrangements that they regard as worse than the WTO status quo. To understand how weak countries have managed to overcome developed countries’ IP- and investment-related campaigns and thus prevail (even in the qualified sense) in an important international setting like the WTO, I draw on the insights from two approaches to the study of international political economy (IPE), structuralism and institutionalism. The structuralist approach focuses on the distribution of resources as the key determinant for explaining international outcomes, while the institutionalist approach focuses on the effects of rules. What we see is that, within a broad set of constraints that is determined by the distribution of resources, the rules of the WTO drive the outcomes. In particular, the WTO’s rules of unweighted voting and consensus decision-making have inflated developing countries’ influence in the post-Uruguay Round setting and allowed them to block the efforts of wealthier countries to impose new constraints on national policy in the areas of IP and investment. In the concluding section I address a subsequent question that logically follows from the analysis: why, if developing countries can block developed countries’ initiatives now were they unable to do so during the Uruguay Round?

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

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

Market Access and the EU Referendum

In light of the upcoming EU Referendum Professor Ken Shadlen sheds some light on the implications for Britain’s trade

On a Quest for universal social policy in the south

On Tuesday 28 February 2017, The Department of International Development hosted a book launch for Diego Sánchez-Ancochea’s new book, The Quest for Universal Social Policy in the South. The event was chaired by Ken Shadlen and the discussants on the night were Tasha Fairfield and Anthony Hall

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