TIME Excellence Lecture

Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 6th of December 2022 at 13:00 Athens time. The speaker is Margaret Kyle, CERNA. The title of the talk is “TRIPS, Pharmaceutical Patents, and Generic Competition in India", it is joint work with Bhaven Sampat, and Ken Shadlen.

This webinar is free and open to all. The moderator is Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos. 

Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/96479541729

Meeting ID: 964 7954 1729

NOTE: To participate please contact Andreas Panagopoulos at least an hour prior to the webinar.

Abstract: Before the 1995 Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, India did not allow pharmaceutical product patents. TRIPS required India (and many other developing countries) to amend patent laws to grant product patents on drugs, raising concerns among policymakers, academics, and advocacy groups that the new patent regime would hinder access to medicines. This paper assesses the impact of TRIPS on competition in India using new and updated data on patents, and exploits the precise institutional details of TRIPS implementation. We argue that a significant effect was unlikely to be immediate in India and most developing countries, and indeed may have been realized only relatively recently. When we focus on the set of drugs fully under the TRIPS regime, those that are eligible for stronger “primary” patent protection, we find large effects of patents on competition. The results are likely to be more representative of the long-run steady state impact of TRIPS in India than are previous estimates.