Globalization, Export-Led Growth and Inequality: The East Asian Story
Over the last three decades, several East Asian economies have grown by leaps and bounds. The success of their export-led growth model is regarded, and copied, by many emerging economies as a sure path to achieve high-income status. But with impressive growth came worsening inequality both in personal income and functional income distribution. (more…)
The African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) Protocol on Patents: Implications for Access to Medicines
This paper was commissioned to better understand the workings of the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (commonly known as “ARIPO”) with regard to its Protocol on Patents and Industrial Designs and to examine the effect of implementation of the Protocol (Section on Patents) on the promotion of access to affordable medicines. (more…)
Patent Protection for Plants: Legal Options for Developing Countries
The paper examines, first, the exclusion of patent protection for plants, including plant varieties, biological materials, and essentially biological processes for the production of plants. The legal implications of the right – recognized under the TRIPS Agreement – to exclude plants from patent protection are briefly discussed, as well as how the exclusion allowed by article 27.3(b) of said Agreement has been implemented at the national level and, particularly, whether it can be extended to parts and components of plants. (more…)
Innovative Financing Mechanisms: Potential Sources of Financing the WHO Tobacco Convention
This research paper is produced as part of a research being conducted by the South Centre on expanding fiscal policies for global and national tobacco control. The objective of this research is to identify innovative solutions to fill the funding gaps in the implementation of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). (more…)
Regional Pooled Procurement of Medicines in the East African Community
This paper explores the current discussions in the East African Community (EAC) with regard to the establishment of a regional pooled procurement mechanism for essential medicines. (more…)
Tackling the Proliferation of Patents: How to Avoid Undue Limitations to Competition and the Public Domain
The steady increase in patent applications and grants that is taking place in developed and some developing countries (notably in China) is sometimes hailed as evidence of the strength of global innovation and of the role of the patent system in encouraging it. However, such an increase does not correspond to a genuine augmentation in innovation. (more…)
Obstacles to Development in the Global Economic System
I. Obstacles to Development Arising from the International System
As the international community wades into the political discussions regarding the alternatives to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) after 2015 and the design of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as mandated by the Rio+20 conference, it is timely to consider the question of whether development is a matter mostly of individual effort on the part of nation-states or whether there are elements in the international economic system that could serve as significant obstacles to national development efforts. (more…)
Crisis Mismanagement in the United States and Europe: Impact on Developing Countries and Longer-Term Consequences
There are two major failings in policy interventions in the crisis in the US and Europe: the reluctance to remove the debt overhang through timely, orderly and comprehensive restructuring and the shift to fiscal austerity after an initial reflation. These have resulted in excessive reliance on monetary means with central banks entering uncharted policy waters, including zero-bound interest rates and the acquisition of long-term public and private bonds. (more…)
Public-private Partnerships in Global Health: Putting Business before Health?
Public and private sector interaction in health has always existed at the national level; in the United Nations (UN) system, public-private partnerships (PPPs) started at the end of the 1990s with the reform of the UN system launched by Kofi Annan. (more…)
Waving Or Drowning: Developing Countries After The Financial Crisis
Not only has the “Great Recession” led to a “Great Slowdown” in developing countries, but also their longer-term growth prospects are clouded by global structural imbalances and fragilities that culminated in the current crisis. (more…)
Access to Medicines and Intellectual Property: The contribution of the World Health Organization
The topic of intellectual property first appeared in the WHO in 1996 and coincided with the end of the Uruguay Round and the creation of the World Trade Organization. In 1995 the Charles III University of Madrid with the WHO Drugs Action Programme (DAP) organized a conference where Professor Carlos Correa presented a paper entitled “The Uruguay Round and Drugs”. (more…)
Asian Initiatives at Monetary and Financial Integration: A Critical Review.
Whilst the first steps towards Asian trade cooperation stated in 1970s, it was the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 that triggered Asian efforts at monetary and financial integration. This paper argues that the conditions for Asian monetary integration are not conducive but that efforts at monetary cooperation should proceed at three fronts – exchange rate cooperation, coordination of capital flows control, and strengthening of regional financial liquidity management as in the Chiang Mai Initiative and regional surveillance. (more…)
