Designing National Regimes that Promote Public Health Objectives

The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects on Intellectual Property Rights, 1995, has introduced several mandatory changes to patent protection on pharmaceuticals that can affect health care and delivery in developing countries. The potential detrimental impacts of such IPR protection raise three major concerns for developing countries in the area of public health: (a) How can developing countries deal with price increases that can result from increased patent protection to ensure access to and availability of essential medicines in the future? (b) How can developing countries deal with any negative impacts that intellectual property rights may have on restricting their space for innovation and learning in the pharmaceutical sector? If intellectual property rights are not sufficient incentives, what other instruments can developing countries look up to, in order to foster research into diseases of importance to their populations? Given that IPRs form an integral part of technology policy, for a good technology policy that promotes the goal of public health, options within the IPR system are no doubt very important, but options outside the IPR system which help developing countries achieve their development objectives are equally important. The main focus of this paper is to explore options outside IPR regimes that can help achieve flexibility, such as parallel imports and compulsory licensing, in addition to many others in the realm of competition law and policy, for developing countries to be able to pursue technology policies that guarantee public health