The Doha Declaration constitutes a major step forward insofar as it acknowledges in the WTO context that the introduction of patents in the health sector has significant impacts on access to drugs. However, the Declaration neither amends the TRIPS Agreement nor provides a basis for developing countries to link their patent and health legislations. The Patents (Amendment) Act, 2002 closely follows TRIPS and in the process does away with provisions of the 1970 Act that constituted India's own response to the challenge of providing exclusive commercial rights in a field concerned with the fulfilment of basic health needs.
In attempting to ensure that the pharmaceutical industry is able to function profitably, and perhaps, efficiently, policy-makers have completely ignored the health concerns that are integrally linked to the contours of the drug policy.
To ensure that patent-abusive situations, such as the ones that occurred in South Africa, do not repeat themselves, member countries of the WTO must draft balanced domestic patent legislations based on a rational interpretation of the TRIPS text.
While in general it is admitted that host governments' policies may play an important role in extracting the benefits of FDI for development, a more exact analysis of the relative role of different policy measures in shaping the magnitudes and quality of FDI inflows is not available. Such an analysis has become even more important now in the context of the new international trading regime under the aegis of the WTO which covers issues which have an important bearing on the ability of national governments in regulating the patterns of FDI inflows. This paper presents some findings of a comprehensive attempt to quantitatively analyse the role of structural, geographical and policy factors in shaping the patterns of MNE activity. The focus is on the role of host government policies and on the implications of the emerging WTO regime in their light.
