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?

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

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

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

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