Balancing Wealth and Health : The Battle over Intellectual Property and Access to Medicines in Latin America

This book examines the tension between intellectual property law and access to medicine in a set of developing countries caught between their international trade obligations and their commitment to the health of their citizens. It presents case studies, conducted with a common methodology, in eleven Latin American countries.

This book focusses on the debates concerning aspects of intellectual property law that bear on access to medicines in a set of developing countries. Specifically, the contributors look at measures that regulate the acquisition, recognition, and use of patent rights on pharmaceuticals and trade secrets in data concerning them, along with the conditions under which these rights expire so as to permit the production of cheaper generic drugs. In addition, the book includes commentary from scholars in human rights, international institutions, and transnational activism. The case studies presented from 11 Latin American countries, have many commonalities in terms of economics, legal systems, and political histories, and yet they differ in the balance each has struck between proprietary interests and access concerns. The book documents this cross-country variation in legal norms and practice, identifies the factors that have led to differences in result, and theorizes as to how differentials among these countries occur and why they endure within a common transnational regulatory regime. The work concludes by putting the results of the investigations into a global administrative law frame and offers suggestions on institutional mechanisms for considering the trade-offs between health and wealth.