Suchergebnisse

Why do some countries adopt exogenous rules into their domestic law when those laws do not align with the country's specific interests? This article draws on the policy diffusion literature to identify four causal mechanisms that are hypothesized to give rise to those transplants in the case of asymmetric interests. While the literature presents these mechanisms independently, this article argues that each works in combination with the others to facilitate legal transplantation. The empirical demonstration is based on a quantitative analysis of legal transplants in the field of intellectual property (IP), and incorporates an original index of IP protection in 121 developing countries over 14 years. Our results suggest that, while one mechanism – coercion – is instrumental in initiating the transplantation process, it fades over time and is largely supplanted by three others: contractualization, socialization and regulatory competition acting in a mutually supportive manner. This article concludes with a plea for theoretical eclecticism, acknowledging multi-causality and context-conditionality. Any comprehensive explanation of legal transplantation must include the identification of mutual reinforcement between causal mechanisms, rather than simply ranking their relative contributions. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

It is a vast understatement to say that the problem of access to medicines in developing countries is complex. Access is limited by a range of factors including inability to pay, a lack of infrastructure, and corruption in some countries. Surrounding and exacerbating these structural and technological problems is the layer of legal rights created by patents and their licensing that complicate and render more expensive the preparation and delivery of needed medicines, particularly those that need to be adapted to the social, health and cultural environment of developing countries. This article provides a survey of innovative strategies that aim at maximizing the potential of patents to facilitate the development and delivery of medicines against diseases, the burden of which falls principally on developing country populations. To understand the context in which these strategies are being proposed and implemented, the article reviews the battles over access to medicines beginning in the late 1980s. It then surveys some of the principal suggestions put forward to better direct innovation systems in addressing the critical health needs of the world's majority including advance market commitments, patent buy-outs, prize funds, public-private partnerships and patent pools. © 2012 London School of Economics and Political Science and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. ; SCOPUS: ar.j ; FLWNA ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Plant-derived vaccines may soon displace conventional vaccines. Assuming there are no major technological barriers undermining the feasibility of this innovative technology, it is worthwhile to generate quantitative models of regulatory burden of producing and diffusing plant-derived vaccines in industrialized and developing countries. A dynamic simulation model of technology diffusion -- and the data to populate it -- has been generated for studying regulatory barriers in the diffusion of plant-derived vaccines. The role of regulatory burden is evaluated for a variety of scenarios in which plant-derived vaccines are produced and diffused. This model relates the innovative and conventional vaccine technologies and the effects of the impact of the uptake of the innovative technology on mortality and morbidity. This case study demonstrates how dynamic simulation models can be used to assess the long-term potential impact of novel technologies in terms of a variety of socio-economic indicators. ; The authors gratefully acknowledge support from Genome Canada through the Ontario Genomics Institute and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada supported Intellectual Property Modeling Group. ; Includes bibliographical references

The discovery of the two inherited susceptibility genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 in the mid-1990s created the possibility of predictive genetic testing and led to the establishment of specific medical programmes for those at high risk of developing breast cancer in the UK, US and Europe. The book provides a coherent structure for examining the diversity of practices and discourses that surround developments linked to BRCA genetics, and to the evolving field of genetics more broadly. It will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, history of science, STS, public health and bioethics. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780415824064_oachapter8.pdf