The political economy of pharmaceutical patents: sectional interests and the African group at the WTO

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The political economy of pharmaceutical patents: sectional interests and the African group at the WTO, by Sherry S. Marcellin, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010, 226 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781409412144

This is an outstanding book which makes an important contribution to a subject that remains underexamined: the role of power, dominance, influence and control in international institutions. The book essentially addresses two linked themes: institutional capture by private interests, and the losses suffered by African countries, and developing countries in general, in international bargaining and negotiations. The theatre of negotiations that Marcellin focuses on is the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in particular. The book is well structured with a cogent, persuasive and clear argument, thoroughly supported with necessary details and a lot of data. Drawing on Robert Cox's Braudelian historical structures framework, Marcellin employs a theoretical framework that approaches decision-making in international trade as a function of the dominant political–economic framework. The power of this approach is that it does not take for granted the economists' rationalist assumption of institutions as value-free, neutral and somehow necessary for the efficient function of global capitalism.

For all its pretensions that all member countries of the WTO are equal before the organisation's laws, some are more equal than others. The historical record of almost five decades of trade negotiations – which I detailed in my own doctoral research – demonstrates quite clearly that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the legal and institutional basis of the global trade regime embodied in the WTO, was dominated by the Western world. Marcellin takes this argument further and convincingly demonstrates the way in which private corporate interests, especially the pharmaceutical industry, have secured their demands for an international patent code under what has become a cornerstone agreement of the global trade regime, the TRIPS agreement. The book thus presents an outstanding case study of ‘institutional capture’ by the transnational pharmaceutical industry, dominated as it is by the United States.

In some sense Marcellin's book is a continuation of the work of Robert Cox and Harold Jacobson in their Anatomy of Influence, first published 40 years ago, in 1973. Their main argument was that institutions like the WTO were not autonomous creations that emerged, value-free, from nowhere, nor were they merely outcomes of rational human endeavour; rather, international institutions are products of hegemonic powers and subject to prevailing environmental forces. The WTO, then, is a creation of its time, a time of liberal capitalist hegemony dominated by the US and its allies, who have consistently shored up their power in key institutions that preside over the global political economy. With specific reference to institutional capture and shoring up the transnational pharmaceutical industry's power, dominance and influence in the WTO, Marcellin demonstrates very effectively how conflict and power relations in TRIPS negotiations left developing countries, especially African countries, without any measurable gains and effectively forced them into compliance with industry demands for a patent regime. The outcome of this bargaining process was a TRIPS regime stripped of human welfare considerations. The main reasons for these losses on the part of developing countries (DCs) are captured in the following passage:

One of the most fundamental drawbacks faced by DCs [in the global political economy] is their inability to bargain on a level playing field with their industrialised counterparts. An important structural issue putting many such countries at a disadvantage is the lack of resources, capacity and/or expertise for effective deliberation… Most small delegations do not have the appropriate resources either in Geneva or in their capitals to service the negotiating process and thereby participate meaningfully in what could be a meeting of primary importance for their national interests. (144)

Here we find a distinct echo of a broader body of research that illustrates the disadvantages that poor countries, especially African countries, have in international bargaining. While scholars and policy-makers across a spectrum of disciplinary approaches have recorded such disadvantages, they have rarely, if ever, focused on particular private corporate gains over developing countries. Marcellin places this issue at the centre of her work, and thereby provides an important counterweight to the rising literature of nostalgia for neoliberalism. The neoliberal orthodoxy that dominated economic policy-making from the time of the Reagan–Thatcher era started to come under increased internal pressure from the mid 1990s, especially in the wake of the East Asian Crisis. Among orthodox economists there emerged a general, if fairly thinly spread consensus that the state did, after all, have a role in political economic expansion (e.g., World Bank 1997). By the time that banking and financial institutions started imploding in 2007, the general unease with neoliberal orthodoxy spread more rapidly. In the midst of all this, however, there remained a stubborn loyalty, and more recently a type of nostalgia, for neoliberal orthodoxy. Part of this persistent loyalty was a belief, especially among the transnational elite perched at the top of Robert Cox's global class structure, that ‘problems’ such as poverty, inequality, and conflict, among others, could be ‘solved’ if only poor states would create the right institutions (e.g., Acemoğlu and Robinson 2012; Banerjee and Duflo 2011).

Marcellin's book makes a significant contribution to a debate that has remained obscured by dominant discourses on global political economy. The one big concern – through no fault of the author – is that it may be lost in the maelstrom of discussions and obsessions over global banking, financial and economic crises, due to its focus on the global trade regime and intellectual property rights. These concerns appear to have dissolved into the background of ‘international’ affairs, and remain, at least for now, relatively unchallenged.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.820522

References

1. Acemoğlu D. and Robinson J. A.. 2012. . Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. New York . , Crown Publishers. .

2. Banerjee A. V. and Duflo E.. 2011. . Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. New York . , PublicAffairs. .

3. Cox R. W. and Jacobson H. K.. 1973. . The Anatomy of Influence: Decision Making in International Organization. New Haven, Conn . , Yale University Press. .

4. World Bank. . 1997. . The State in a Changing World: World Development Report. Washington DC . , International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. .