In the context of the TRIPS agreement and the accompanying debate about the merits of the requirement to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals, this paper provides a rigorously-derived estimate of the possible impact of pharmaceutical product patents on prices and welfare in a developing...

There has been much debate about how much poor people in developing countries gain from trade openness, as one aspect of ‘globalization’. The paper views the issue through both ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ empirical lenses. The macro lens uses cross-country...