Patents and Market Concentration

Despite the vigorous strengthening of the global patent system in recent years, not only in industrialized economies like the USA, but also in the developing world, there have been limited attempts to measure the rise in concentration levels due to the patent system.  This talk provides a first empirical assessment showing that concentration of patents results in market concentration in the pharma sector in the USA and contributes to greater returns for affiliates of U.S. companies in developing country markets of India, China and Brazil. A number of questions for intellectual property policy and competition policy are examined.

Padmashree Gehl Sampath is a leading expert on trade policy, innovation policy and economic development. She works at the United Nations in Geneva and is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, and is currently a 2018-2019 fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, Harvard University. She has worked on issues of IP and access to medicines for over two decades, as an academic and in the UN system, serving first as an expert to WHO’s Committee on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Public Health in 2005 and then leading WHO’s work on local production, technology transfer and access to medicines in 2009-2010. She has coordinated large inter-agency projects of the UN on local production and access to medicines, authored several white papers on the topic, as well as been as consultant to various donor UN agencies on the topic of promoting capacity building in African and Asian countries to improve drug pricing, access to medicines and health innovation.  She is the author of five books, several journal publications and book chapters.

Moderated by:

Mark Wu is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a Director of the Berkman Klein Center. His work focuses on international trade and international intellectual property matters. Prior to joining HLS the faculty in 2010, Mark Wu was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School and a law clerk to Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He has served as the Director for Intellectual Property in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, where he led negotiations on the IP chapters of various free trade agreements. In addition, he worked as an engagement manager for McKinsey & Co., as an economist and operations officer for the World Bank in China, and as an economist for the United Nations Development Programme in Namibia.

This event is a brown-bag luncheon and we encourage you to bring lunch to enjoy during event. Please note this event is not being live webcast and we encourage you to attend in person.

The Digital Health @ Harvard series features speakers from Harvard as well as collaborators and colleagues from other institutions who research the intersection between health and digital technology. The series is cosponsored by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. The goal of the series is to discuss ongoing research in this research area, share new developments, identify opportunities for collaboration, and explore the digital health ecosystem more generally