Patent and Trade Disparities in Developing Countries

Description

For developing countries, the concept of sustainable development, as opposed to rapid pockets of development, embodies great promise for socio-political reasons. To date, most analyses of development has focused independently on different trade mechanisms or intellectual property regimes, which has resulted in overly narrow and sometimes paradoxical conclusions, with corresponding policy targets that tend to promise far more than they can deliver. While each of these mechanisms embodies its own benefits and disadvantages, how they would interact together, and what kind of results they can produce, remains fully unexplored. Similarly, almost all of these regimes provide generalized solutions that developing countries tend to denounce as ill-fitting. There are several flexibilities that can be used as effective tools, but which flexibility applies to what context remains contentious.   Patent and Trade Disparities in Developing Countries, by Srividhya Ragavan, explores these matters in-depth. It examines the interaction between trade and intellectual property regimes (using India as the focal point, and with a study on patents) in an integrated developmental framework to determine whether and how sustainable economic growth can be achieved in developing countries. This book delves into deliberate yet important questions: Is compulsory licensing the best way to provide access to medication or is patent protection more efficient? Should innovation in plant breeding be protected at all? If so, should it be using patents or a sui generis mechanism? What is the impact of the agricultural negotiations on plant variety protection?

Table of contents

Foreword by Jairam Ramesh; Preface to the Indian Edition; Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. Correlation Between Patents and Development: Lessons From History; 2. The Unequals: National Realities and Patent Regimes of the Developing World; 3. The International Trade Regime in Perspective; 4. The Poor Nations Harmonize; 5. The Missing Piece of the TRIPS Puzzle: Procedural Mechanisms; 6. TRIPS Patent Regime: The Poverty Penalty; 7. Is A Substantive Regime Adequate to Generate Full Compliance? The Biotechnology Debate; 8. Dying to Dine—The Story of the Great Agricultural Barrier; 9. The Debate on Plant Variety Protection; 10. Harvesting Poverty: The PBR Story in a Subsidy Plot; 11. Biodiversity: The Third but Ignored Paradigm of the Trade Regime; 12. Can the Trade Regime Lead to Sustainable Development?; Index.