Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34238347›Full record

ArticleGlobalization and health2021

Defending access to medicines in regional trade agreements: lessons from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership - a qualitative study of policy actors' views.

Belinda Townsend

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Globalization and health, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
4citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

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2 · The registry

The trial behind it

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

4 citing papers in PubMed.

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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

1 author.

Belinda TownsendMenzies Centre for Health Governance, School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. belinda.townsend@anu.edu.au.ORCID 0000-0002-2480-2820

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundThe Regional Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) is a mega regional trade agreement signed by fifteen countries on 15 November 2020 after 8 years of negotiation. Signatories include the ten members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus China, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Australia. India was a negotiating party until it withdrew from the negotiations in November 2019. The RCEP negotiations were initially framed as focused on the needs of low income countries. Public health concerns emerged however when draft negotiating chapters were leaked online, revealing pressures on countries to agree to intellectual property and investment measures that could exacerbate issues of access to medicines and seeds, and protecting regulatory space for public health. A concerted Asia Pacific civil society campaign emerged in response to these concerns, and in 2019, media and government reporting suggested that several of these measures had been taken off the table, which was subsequently confirmed in the release of the signed text in November 2020.

resultsThis paper examines civil society and health actors' views of the conditions that successfully contributed to the removal of these measures in RCEP, with a focus on intellectual property and access to medicines. Drawing on twenty semi-structured qualitative interviews with civil society, government and legal and health experts from nine countries participating in the RCEP negotiations, the paper reports a matrix of ten conditions related to actor power, ideas, political context and specific health issues that appeared to support prioritisation of some public health concerns in the RCEP negotiations.

conclusionsConditions identified included strong low and middle income country leadership; strong civil society mobilisation, increased technical capacity of civil society and low and middle income negotiators; supportive public health norms; processes that somewhat opened up the negotiations to hear public health views; the use of evidence; domestic support for health issues; and supportive international public health legislation. Lessons from the RCEP can inform prioritisation of public health in future trade agreement negotiations.

Indexed as

CommerceInternational CooperationHealth Services AccessibilityHumansIntellectual PropertyPolicyAccess to medicinesAdvocacyCivil societyIntellectual propertyPublic healthRCEPRegional comprehensive economic partnershipTrade agreementTRIPSTRIPS-plus

Identifiers

PMID34238347
PMCPMC8264472

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.