i guess i really should read his book. thanks for the recommendation. all i can say for now is that it will go on the list.

i’d really like to know how many people were killed by the trade policies rubin and summers pushed during the clinton years.

p.s. iirc bhagwati is not a batshit crazy free trader and does not advocate for destabilizing capital liberalization.

Drugs and intellectual property. The intellectual property regime adopted in the last round of trade negotiations – Trips – deprived millions in the developing world of access to life-saving drugs. As a chorus of researchers has pointed out, the provisions, pushed by the pharmaceutical companies, were so unbalanced that they were bad for scientific progress. Here, there has been some progress – but not enough. Provisions demanded by the US would have made it difficult for small countries to gain affordable access.

from stiglitz in 2004:

The second issue concerns the unbalanced intellectual property provisions (Trips) of the Uruguay round of trade talks, dictated by America’s pharmaceutical and entertainment industries. These provisions restricted countries from making generic imitations of drugs, making many critically important medicines unaffordable in developing countries.

Spearheaded by worries about Aids, activists demanded that something be done. Just before last year’s trade talks in Mexico, the US made some concessions so that it was no longer the only hold-out. In its bilateral trade agreements, however, it is demanding what is becoming known as “Trips-plus”, which would strengthen intellectual property rights further, to ensure that countries only have the right to produce inexpensive generic drugs during epidemics and other emergencies.

The global consensus, reflected in the commission report, calls for more exceptions so that, say, drugs can be made available in any case where to do so could save a life. To those confronting the prospect of death, what matters is access to life-saving drugs, not whether what is killing the person is part of an epidemic.

bad for scientific progress too (1999):

Stiglitz argued that a system of strong IP protection would also hamper the pace of innovation, and that knowledge will lead to greater commercial benefits if it is treated more as a public good than private property. A hawkish approach to intellectual property rights, he predicts, will encourage monopoly practices.

Stiglitz is understood to have wanted these views reflected in the World Bank’s latest World Development Report. However, sources at the bank say that Stiglitz was unable to have his way following objections from the United States.

The US government argued that member states of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have already agreed on the need for strong IP systems under the WTO’s Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPs).

Nonetheless, Stiglitz revealed in his talk that when he worked in the White House in Washington, both the Council of Economic Advisers and the Office of Science and Technology Policy were worried about the potentially adverse consequence of strong IPR for innovation. “If practices that [some companies] are engaged in are not against the law, then the issue is, perhaps the law should be changed,” he added.

alternative: prizes not patents

There is an alternative way of financing and incentivizing research that, at least in some instances, could do a far better job than patents, both in directing innovation and ensuring that the benefits of that knowledge are enjoyed as widely as possible: a medical prize fund that would reward those who discover cures and vaccines. Since governments already pay the cost of much drug research directly or indirectly, through prescription benefits, they could finance the prize fund, which would award the biggest prizes for developers of treatments or preventions for costly diseases affecting hundreds of millions of people.