The paper argues that China is building capacity to grant, use and enforce patents. Its interests in the patent system are different to many G77 countries. The paper considers three questions. Can China make the patent system work for it? If so, how will the US respond? What should the weaker...

Regulatory capitalism is a capitalist order in which actors, both state and non-state, use a wide array of techniques to influence market behaviour. Many actors find themselves in regulatory relationships, relationships in which they are sometimes the regulator and in other contexts the...

The implementation of patent law in the emerging market countries is having an impact on the international patent system. First, it is apparent that the principal emerging market economies are not strictly adhering to the patent regimen of the USA, Europe and Japan, but are instead adapting...

Climate change is a collective action problem that has often been analysed as a Prisoner’s Dilemma. States have an incentive to free ride on the efforts of others. Yet around the globe national and sub-national governments are introducing regulatory measures to reduce emissions that can be...

When a developing country negotiates with a large developed country it generally faces the problem of unequal bargaining power. Within the context of trade negotiations forming coalitions is one natural response to this. However, even in multilateral contexts the sources of bargaining power...

The protection of traditional knowledge by means of intellectual property rights is one of the major work items of international organizations. Less attention has been paid to the relationship between systems of indigenous innovation and intellectual property. Using Australia as a case study,...

Does the evolution of the intellectual property regime hold any lessons for the climate change regime? The paper argues that the architecture of the intellectual property regime recognizes the complexity of free riding behaviour and divides the problem amongst a number of treaties. The...

Many recent international agreements sponsored by bodies such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) aim to facilitate the global free flow of goods, services and capital, by opening markets under the threat of trade sanctions. Nation states signing such agreements, in particular the Trade...

On 1 January 2005, a controversial trade agreement entered into force between Australia and the United States. Though heralded by the parties as facilitating the removal of barriers to free trade (in ways not achievable in multilateral fora), it also contained many trade-restricting intellectual...

Based on a large empirical study of the globalization of business regulation, John Braithwaite and Peter Drahos show that both races to the bottom and races to the top are common in the world system. The focus is on understanding ratcheting up mechanisms. Can health NGOs put these to work to...