The issue of how patents impact medicine has increased in significance within the last decade. The book provides an explanation of the current international infrastructure and explains how competing patent perspectives play a thus far unacknowledged role in promoting distortion and confusion.

Protecting and promoting health is inherently a political endeavor that requires a sophisticated understanding of the distribution and use of power. Yet while the global nature of health is widely recognized, its political nature is less well understood. In recent decades, the interdisciplinary field of global health politics has emerged to demonstrate the interconnections of health and core political topics, including foreign and security policy, trade, economics, and development. Today a growing body of scholarship examines how the global health landscape has both shaped and been shaped by political actors and structures. The Oxford Handbook of Global Health Politics provides an authoritative overview and assessment of research on this important and complicated subject. The volume is motivated by two arguments. First, health is not simply a technical subject, requiring evidence-based solutions to real-world problems, but an arena of political contestation where norms, values, and interests also compete and collide. Second, globalization has fundamentally changed the nature of health politics in terms of the ideas, interests, and institutions involved. The volume comprises more than 30 chapters by leading experts in global health and politics. Each chaper provides an overview of the state of the art on a given theoretical perspective, major actor, or global health issue. The Handbook offers both an excellent introduction to scholars new to the field and also an invaluable teaching and research resource for experts seeking to understand global health politics and its future directions.

Access to medicine is a topic of widespread interest. However, some issues that impact such access are presently inadequately understood. In particular, international laws require most nations to provide patents on drugs, resulting in premium prices that limit access. In Access to Medicine in the Global Economy, Professor Cynthia Ho explains such laws and their impact for a diverse group of readers, from scholars and policy makers to students in a variety of disciplines. This book explains and interprets important international agreements, beginning with the landmark Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), but also including more recent free trade agreements and the pending Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Professor Ho addresses controversial topics, such as when a nation can provide a compulsory license, as well as whether a nation may suspend in-transit generic goods. The book also discusses how patent-like rights (such as "data exclusivity") prevent lower-cost generic medicines from entering into the marketplace and provides strategies for minimizing the harm of such rights. Clear explanations and diagrams, frequently asked questions, and case studies make these topics accessible to any reader. The case studies also provide a theory of patent perspectives that helps explain why access to medicine, though a universal goal, remains elusive in practice. The book aims to provide an important first step toward eventual workable solutions by promoting a better understanding of existing and future laws that impact access to medicine.

Recent political, social, and economic changes in Africa have provoked radical shifts in the landscape of health and healthcare. Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa captures the multiple dynamics of a globalized world and its impact on medicine, health, and the delivery of healthcare in Africa—and beyond. Essays by an international group of contributors take on intractable problems such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and insufficient access to healthcare, drugs, resources, hospitals, and technologies. The movements of people and resources described here expose the growing challenges of poverty and public health, but they also show how new opportunities have been created for transforming healthcare and promoting care and healing.

With the launch of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, its Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) emerged as a symbol of coercion in international economic relations. In the decade that followed, intellectual property became one of the most contentious topics of global policy debate. This book is the first full-length study of the politics surrounding what developing countries did to implement TRIPS and why. Based on a review of the evidence from 1995 to 2007, this book emphasises that developing countries exhibited considerable variation in their approach to TRIPS implementation. In particular, developing countries took varying degrees of advantage of the legal safeguards and options-commonly known as TRIPS 'flexibilities'-that the Agreement provides. To explain this variation, this book argues that TRIPS implementation must be understood as a complex political game played out among developing country governments and a range of stakeholders-developed countries, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), and industry groups. The contested nature of the TRIPS bargain spurred competing efforts to revise the terms of TRIPS and to influence global IP regulation more broadly. The intensity of the implementation game was amplified by an awareness among the various stakeholders that the IP reforms developing countries pursued would influence these ongoing international negotiations. The book attributes the variation in TRIPS implementation to the interplay between these global IP debates, international power pressures, and political dynamics within developing countries. The book includes historical analysis, compilations of evidence, and analysis supported by examples from across the developing world. The Implementation Game will be of interest both to scholars of international relations, law, and international political economy as well as to policymakers, commentators, and activists engaged in debates on the global governance of intellectual property.

This new book contains contributions on countries from Italy and Mexico to China and India. It recognises the disparity between conditions in these countries and poses interesting questions about post cluster globalisation.

Complex geopolitical debate surrounds the role of intellectual property (IP) in advancing and achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Summarising and advancing this discourse, this prescient Companion is a thorough examination of how IP law interacts, influences and impacts each of the seventeen SDGs.