Under the TRIPS agreement, WTO members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals. The debate about the merits of this requirement has been extremely contentious. Many low income economies claim that patent protection for pharmaceuticals will result in substantially higher...

Under the TRIPS agreement, WTO members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals. The debate about the merits of this requirement has been and continues to be extremely contentious. Many poor developing economies claim that patent protection for pharmaceuticals will result in...

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...

Under the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights, the World Trade Organization members are required to enforce product patents for pharmaceuticals. In this paper we empirically investigate the welfare effects of this requirement on developing countries using data for the...