Developing countries tend to take a negative view of the protection of intellectual property rights as reflected in the TRIPs agreement, as this seems to conflict with their own developmental needs. As the following article points out, there are, however, a number of reasons why developing...

Escalating healthcare expenditures and the need to ensure access to affordable medicine in both emerging and emerged economies are fuelling calls to contain the so-called evergreening practices of drug producers around the world. But such practices are the necessary outcome of a system that...

This article examines a sample of German pharmaceutical firms to highlight the strategic reasons why firms participate in various intellectual property (IP) marketplaces, both proprietary (patents and copyrights) and non-proprietary (open source and non-patented technology). The obstacles that...

This article discusses the medical/therapeutical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and their political economy context. First, the very quick development of several vaccines highlights the richness of the basic knowledge waiting for therapeutical exploitation. Such knowledge has largely...