Globalization of intellectual property (IP) protection for medicines has been advancing during the past decade. Countries are obliged to adapt their legislation as a requirement of their membership to the World Trade Organization or as a condition of being part of international trade agreements. There is a growing recognition that, in low-income countries, stronger IP protection is a barrier to...

The pursuit of sustainable development requires balancing the objectives of FDI, Trade, economic growth and environmental protection. Achieving a balance between these often-conflicting priorities is difficult enough at the national level, where competing interests are at least grounded in a common environmental, social and economic context. At the international level, where different countries...

Palpable tension continues at the intersection of tobacco control and trade policy. Through consideration of four major tobacco control-related trade disputes, we suggest how to empower public health proponents in the face of entrenched economic policymaking norms. We argue that a more effective pro-tobacco control message should: (a) seek to be broadly consistent with core principles of the wo...

â  â â â  â  abstract â  this paper examines convergence of real gdp per capita in the selected east asian countries and this relationship with selected middle east countries during the period 1950-2009. the reason behind this refers to the fact that east asia countries (including china, hong kong, singapore, malaysia, indonesia, thailand, japan and south korea) have been involved in achieving ...

after establishment of the world trade organization (wto) in 1995, not only all countries around the world had to receive progressively the wto accession but also those that had higher economic potentials benefited further advantages from their memberships. one goal which has been followed by the wto has relied on economic convergence. it is now a time to ask whether convergence in monetary po...

Over the last two decades an unprecedented increase in private vehicle ownership has taken place in the developing world. The total number of registered vehicles in non-Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development (OECD) countries increased from 110 million to 210 million between 1990 and 2005, and, by some estimates, is forecast to increase to 1.2 billion by 2030. Rising income explains ...

A question lies at the core of any examination of the link between immigration and globalization: what exactly would a world without national borders—a world in which people could move freely from one country to another—look like? Economists have, in fact, devoted a lot of effort to documenting how international differences in economic conditions change as national governments lower the barrier...

This paper discusses the interactions between appropriate tax design and international trade, emphasizing issues for developing countries. It sets out the impacts of various taxes on trade and overall economic performance, delineating these effects into those from explicitly trade related taxes (such as tariffs), and the wider set of non trade related taxes such as income, corporate, sales and ...

this article discusses what ethicists have called “unacceptable trade-offs” in health policy choices related to universal health coverage (uhc). since the fiscal space is constrained, trade-offs need to be made. but some trade-offs are unacceptable on the path to universal coverage. unacceptable choices include, among other examples from low-income countries, to expand coverage for services wit...