How do patents and economic policies affect access to essential medicines in developing countries?

Abstract

This paper studies the relationship between patents and access to essential medicines. It finds that in sixty-five low- and middle-income countries, where four billion people live, patenting is rare for 319 products on the World Health Organization's Model List of Essential Medicines. Only seventeen essential medicines are patentable, although usually not actually patented, so that overall patent incidence is low (1.4 percent) and concentrated in larger markets. This and other results shed light on the policy dialogue among public health activists, the pharmaceutical industry, and governments that is often based on mistaken premises about how patents affect corporate revenues or the health of the world's poorest. Pragmatism and greater flexibility are urged, so that policy may better concentrate on the greater causes of epidemic mortality, which now pose unprecedented threats to global peace and security.