This chapter proposes an ex ante approach to tackling drug scarcity. Entities funding pandemic- and epidemic-related research should contractually require recipients to produce sufficient quantities of resulting medicines. The recipient would agree in the event of a future shortage to share its technology and know-how with a qualified third-party manufacturer, in exchange for compensation. Alternatively, funding entities could more broadly utilize dormant licenses, which activate in the event of a pandemic or epidemic, and which require rights holders to license out technology and know-how to alleviate shortages. Such provisions could go even further, integrating reasonable pricing assurances and ensuring access in low-income countries. By tying funding to such rights, governments and nongovernmental organizations could help reduce shortages, improve global access to medicines, and ultimately save lives.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous observers recognized the potential for patents and other intellectual property (IP) rights to hinder the development and dissemination of medical equipment and products responsive to the virus. Concerns over the impact of IP rights on pandemic response led to a range of national and international governmental interventions. Yet these concerns also spurred voluntary, private action by IP rights holders. This chapter discusses and assesses these private initiatives, with a focus on the Open Covid Pledge (OCP), an initiative that the author helped to organize. The OCP eventually led to the voluntary commitment of an estimated 500,000 patents to the COVID-19 response, was endorsed by Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) and adopted by the WHO’s Covid Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) as a recommended mechanism for making technology available in the COVID-19 response.

Economic tradecraft is a set of duties, responsibilities and skills required of diplomats working in economic affairs. It is a key instrument in the diplomatic tradecraft toolbox. As is the case with their colleagues in the political career track, economic officers work both at diplomatic missions abroad and at headquarters. On the surface, it may appear that a country’s economic and commercial diplomats do the same type of work abroad, but that is not quite the case. Economic officers inform policymaking at headquarters by monitoring and analyzing economic trends and developments in the receiving state. They also advocate for host-government policies aimed at leveling the playing field for companies from the home country and against regulations that hurt those businesses. Commercial diplomats directly help industries and individual companies in starting or expanding business and investment in the host country. Conversely, they facilitate investment by local firms in the home country.

For latecomer countries, one crucial decision is whether to follow the path of economic development traveled by rich countries or to seek out new trajectories. This book observes that latecomers do not always follow advanced countries’ paths; rather, they sometimes skip certain stages and even create their own paths by taking detours and pursuing leapfrogging. The need for detours arises due to the entry barriers, such as intellectual property rights restrictions, protectionist measures, and limited policy spaces under WTO. This book proposes an alternative to prevailing development thinking by focusing on nonlinearity and the multiplicity of pathways for latecomers. The book leaves several questions for future research, such as the rules and modus operandi of the government, and importance of initial conditions. Also, the political and economic power balance between global institutions and national actors determines the dynamics of global–local interfaces. This book does not engage much with the issue of sustainable development, but seeking alternative economic development strategies that produce fewer carbon emissions is consistent with the idea of nonlinearity and the multiplicity of developmental trajectories.

This chapter applies Pragmatic Constructivism to assess communities of practice in global health governance. It focuses on the problem of containing contagious diseases. This is one of the tasks of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its practice of declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Given the uncertainty surrounding such a practice, which could lead to the isolation of an effected state, the decision inevitably involves judgement calls rather than the pre-reflexive implementation of pre-planned steps. Applying the first Pragmatic Constructivist test to this practice means asking if the community of practice charged with making that judgement is properly constituted and sufficiently inclusive. The evidence suggests that it is not. The chapter problematizes practice that unduly privileges technical (in this case epidemiological) expertise over social and political advice. A second application of the two Pragmatic Constructivist tests focuses on an inconsistency internal to global health practices as they relate to the distribution of vaccines. Practices that achieve more comprehensive coverage, such as the local manufacture of vaccines, are being prevented by intellectual property practices. The chapter considers how the knowledge of the Covid pandemic challenges the epistemic authority of intellectual property practices.

Generally, the political consensus at the beginning of the internet era was that platforms should have only limited liability under intellectual property law for content that users uploaded on these platforms.1 Now, however, the platforms are the center of gravity for the Internet, drawing in (for technical reasons and owing to network effects) all data streams in the respective ecosystems, for the benefit of the system leader controlling the platform. Furthermore, the contracts that system leaders conclude with business users, and which control their business relationship, not only normally grant the exclusive right to data generated on the platform to the platform provider but also generally neutralize any intellectual property rights held by the business user. Indeed, the system leaders are regulators of their respective ecosystems and use their system of contracts to control the ecosystems and exclude the use and importance of intellectual property rights. The platform or cloud provider contractually secures the right from the platform or cloud user, not only to store the data but also to analyze it and make use of it for the provider’s own benefit, and for the benefit of others in the ecosystem, on all connected markets. The platform providers thus become the masters of their respective data ecosystems; they do indeed hoard the data and generally do not trade or share the data.

This chapter explores the theme of innovation and IP use in the mining industry by providing a foreign direct investment (FDI) angle. It highlights the role of mining multinational enterprises (MNEs), both as main actors of international production and in their links with host countries’ government and social and economic context. The development implications of FDI spillovers seem critical in the mining industry where the bulk of investment takes place in developing countries, often the least developed countries. The chapter describes the mining FDI ecosystem: key MNE players, recent trends and outlook and investment policy directions. It discusses the different types of impacts that mining FDI can have on host countries, with a particular view towards poor and vulnerable economies.

This chapter is structured into three main sections. Section 4.2 provides a brief overview of the legal framework on pharmaceutical patent law in Kenya. Section 4.3 deals with the key issue in this chapter, that is, the incorporation of a model of human rights into the adjudication of disputes involving pharmaceutical patent rights by courts in Kenya. Section 4.4 examines whether, in the light of Article 40(5) of the Kenyan Constitution which provides that the state ‘shall support, promote and protect the intellectual property rights of the people of Kenya’, intellectual property rights can be considered as a human right in Kenya. The chapter concludes with the view that it is essential for courts seeking to protect the right of poor patients to have access to affordable medicines to incorporate a model of human rights when they adjudicate disputes involving pharmaceutical patent rights.

This chapter discusses how culture affects economic development. Based on historical, political, and economic reasons, China today has a strongly pro-economic growth culture. Historically, the Confucian culture of frugality, hard-working, and respecting the family is conducive to economic productivity. Politically, the authoritarian political system has shaped a population that is relatively more obedient and deferent to authority – traits that contribute to efficiency for low-skilled work such as manufactu¬ring. Economically, decades of poverty under Mao’s rule made people extremely motivated to work hard to make money. All these factors fueled China’s high economic growth. The chapter also draws attention to the fact that Mao had left an indelible imprint on today’s business leaders in China, a unique and important phenomenon that the international business community should be aware of. It also shows that a “Mao plus Deng” effect – Mao’s lawlessness and Deng’s call to get rich – is the root cause of property rights violations and especially the persistent problems of product safety and counterfeit goods in China.

How has America’s political economy changed from the long post-war “Fordist” era to the contemporary post-Fordist or knowledge economy? How has this shift affected economic growth and inequality of income and regions? Most analyses focus on specific aspects, like aggregate income inequality, or the rise of a shareholder value model for corporate governance, or increased trade competition (aka globalization), or the financial sector’s disproportionate power and profitability (aka financialization).

The Trump administration’s multi-front trade war dramatically escalated with the imposition of extraordinary tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018. Corporate America has responded with a concerted campaign of resistance. We document these efforts – through extensive participation in notice and comment and public coalition-building – and show that corporate opposition to the trade war is primarily a consequence of firms' sourcing and production linkages with China. In contrast, we find far weaker efforts by anti-trade firms to support the trade war, whether to insulate themselves from import competition or to confront Chinese trade practices. We therefore describe and empirically illustrate the politics of global production networks, and highlight that scholars of trade politics should not neglect opposition to the Trump trade agenda arising from globally integrated firms. Global order in the area of trade hangs in the balance in an ongoing fight between corporate globalism and populist nationalism.

In Jessup’s 1956 Storrs Lecture he defined transnational law as “all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers,” which includes public international law, private international law, and “other rules which do not wholly fit into such standard categories.” Considerable recent scholarship on transnational law has focused on that residual category of “other rules” and their “private” character. There has, however, been a revolution in international law itself since 1956, reflected in a proliferation of international institutions, international courts, treaties, and so-called “soft law” technologies of governance. This chapter assesses the role of international law in the creation of what can be viewed as “transnational legal orders” that penetrate and imbue state law, shape social identity, and inform public and private legal practice. International law, this chapter contends, is even a more important shaper of the transnational than in Jessup’s time, and, in turn is shaped by it.

This chapter focuses on the contributions of economists to the selection, design, and evaluation of language policies, particularly since the late 1970s. We show how to perform status analysis using available data on earnings, language skills, language of work, and language of consumption. Then, we turn to the evaluation of the costs and benefits of language policy measures. We add a section on the use of stylized data, an approach common in economic theoretical modeling and empirical evaluation. Finally, this chapter discusses some challenges in understanding the role of economic processes in language issues.