Browsing by Author "So, Anthony"

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Open Access
Access to Medicine Index: Can a global scorecard framework promote a system of public accountability across the pharmaceutical sector to support increased access to essential medicines in developing countries?
(2013-06-28) Attard, Jamie
This report reviews the Access to Medicine Index (AMTi) in positively changing the pharmaceutical industry. This report notes a number of opportunities for the ATMi to improve its engagement with stakeholders. The current level of engagement between the ATMf and stakeholders, at least on a public level, is not strong. Consistent with the values the ATMi desires to encourage across the pharmaceutical sector, it must also espouse greater levels of objectivity, accountability, transparency and collaboration in order to further contribute to addressing the challenge of access to essential medicines.
Open Access
Empirical measurement of illicit tobacco trade in the Philippines.
(Philipp Rev Econ, 2014-12) Abola, Victor; Sy, Deborah; Denniston, Ryan; So, Anthony
Cigarette smuggling reduces the price of cigarettes, thwarts youth access restrictions, reduces government revenue, and undercuts the ability of taxes to reduce consumption. The tobacco industry often opposes increases to tobacco taxes on the claim that greater taxes induce more smuggling. To date, little is known about the magnitude of smuggling in the Philippines. his information is necessary to effectively address illicit trade and to measure the impacts of tax changes and the introduction of secure tax markings on illicit trade. This study employs two gap discrepancy methods to estimate the magnitude of illicit trade in cigarettes for the Philippines between 1994 and 2009. First, domestic consumption is compared with tax-paid sales to measure the consumption of illicit cigarettes. Second, imports recorded by the Philippines are compared with exports to the Philippines by trade partners to measure smuggling. Domestic consumption fell short of tax-paid sales for all survey years. The magnitude of these differences and a comparison with a prevalence survey for 2009 suggest a high level of survey under-reporting of smoking. In the late 1990s and the mid 2000s, the Philippines experienced two sharp declines in trade discrepancies, from a high of $750 million in 1995 to a low of $133.7 million in 2008. Discrepancies composed more than one-third of the domestic market in 1995, but only 10 percent in 2009. Hong Kong, Singapore, and China together account for more than 80 percent of the cumulative discrepancies over the period and 74 percent of the discrepancy in 2009. The presence of large discrepancies supports the need to implement an effective tax marking and tobacco track and trace system to reduce illicit trade and support tax collection. The absence of a relation between tax changes and smuggling suggests that potential increases in the excise tax should not be discouraged by illicit trade. Finally, the identification of specific trade partners as primary sources for illicit trade may facilitate targeted efforts in cooperation with these governments to reduce illicit trade.
Open Access
Global Health: A Normative Analysis of Intellectual Property Rights and Global Distributive Justice
(2007-05-07T19:06:56Z) DeCamp, Matthew Wayne
In the past several years, the impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs) on access to medicines and medical technologies has come under increased scrutiny. Motivating this are highly publicized cases where IPRs appear the threaten access to particular medicines and diagnostics. As IPRs become globalized, so does the controversy: In 1998, nearly forty pharmaceutical companies filed a lawsuit against South Africa, citing (among other issues) deprivation of intellectual property. This followed South Africa’s implementation of various measures to enable and encourage the use of generic medicines – a move that was particularly controversial for the newly available (and still patented) HIV medicines. While many historical, legal, economic, and policy analyses of these cases and issues exist, few explicitly normative projects have been undertaken. This thesis utilizes interdisciplinary and explicitly normative philosophical methods to fill this normative void, engaging theoretical work on intellectual property and global distributive justice with each other, and with empirical work on IPR reform. In doing so, it explicitly rejects three mistaken assumptions about the debate over IPRs and access to essential medicines: (i) that this debate reduces to a disagreement about empirical facts; (ii) that intellectual property is normatively justified solely by its ability to “maximize innovation”; and (iii) that this controversy reduces to irresolvable disagreement about global distributive justice. Calling upon the best contemporary approaches to human rights, it argues that these approaches lend normative weight in favor of reforming IPRs – both that they should be reformed, and how – to better enable access to essential medicines. Such reforms might include modifying the present global IPR regime or creating new alternatives to the exclusivity of IPRs, both of which are considered in light of a human right to access to essential medicines. Future work will be needed, however, to better specify the content of a right to “essential medicines” and determine a fair distribution of the costs of fulfilling it.
Open Access
Globalisation and antibiotic resistance
(2010) So, Anthony; Furlong, Melissa; Heddini, Andreas
Open Access
Understanding Patent Pools for Global Health: Assessing Their Value in Promoting Access to Essential Medicines
(2014) Eisenberg, Ashley Rose
In response to a lack of access to essential medicines in the developing world, a number of mechanisms have developed that aim to promote greater access to essential medicines, particularly antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS and drugs for the treatment of neglected tropical diseases. These mechanisms operate in a variety of different ways, but share a common theme in that they all ultimately aim to provide affordable drugs to patients in resource-poor settings. However, the existing mechanisms to facilitate increased access to essential medicines all have a number of cons. Patent pools represent a novel approach to facilitating access and have the potential to go beyond the status quo in terms of the various alternatives.
This paper aims to analyze patent pools for global health and whether such novel mechanisms can facilitate greater access to antiretroviral medicines for the treatment of HIV/AIDS and drugs for the treatment of neglected tropical diseases in developing countries. Two patent pools in particular⎯the Medicines Patent Pool and WIPO's Re:Search Consortium⎯are evaluated and compared to existing mechanisms that aim to accomplish the same or similar goals.