Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the title of a new working paper written by myself, any my FTI Consulting colleagues Sabiha Quddus and Suhail Thahir. The abstract is below. Some policymakers have called for weakening of intellectual property protections for vaccines and other pharmaceutical products, with the aim to reduce the price and improve access to existing medical…
That is the title of an FTI White Paper published this year where I was a co-author alongside Antoine Mialhe, Sabiha Quddus, Anne-Sophie Deman, Suhail Thahir and Agnes Sipiczki. The role of Intellectual property (IP) in the development of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics became a central tenant in discussions on how to ensure access to…
That is the title of a 2016 NBER chapter by Heidi Williams and the subtitle is “Evidence from Health Care Markets“. Economic theory back to Nordhaus (1969) predicts that intellectual property rights increase the incentive for firms to invest in research and development and likely this would lead to more innovation. Proving these empirically, however,…
That was the conclusion of The Economist on his decision to suspend intellectual property protections for the makers of COVID-19 vaccines. In the article “Ten million reasons to vaccinate the world“, they write: Many experts argue that, because some manufacturing capacity is going begging, millions more doses might become available if patent-owners shared their secrets,…
What is it great for? Censorship. A book called The Pirate Organization quotes a spokesperson for an intellectual property lobby in Denmark: Child pornography is great! It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that we can…
Governments in emerging markets want their citizens to have better drugs. The big pharmaceutical firms are keen to sell to them. But they are fighting bitterly over the terms. – The Economist. Should emerging markets compel companies to sell drugs to them? As an economist, I am by nature averse to government coercion. When people…
Planet Money has a very interesting article about software patents and companies who exist for the sole purpose of buying these assets and suing other companies. Computer programmers themselves don’t even like their own patents. In previous posts, I’ve made arguments for limiting patents for pharmaceuticals and the cases for software patents is even stronger.…
In general, I am weary of patents (see my Healthcare Manifesto and Against Intellectual Property posts). Sure, they may be useful to spur innovation, but they also harm innovation since one cannot modify or improve a product while there is still a patent. Further, patents generate rent-seeking where inventors spent tons of time wrangling to…