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Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?
Political Organising Behind TRIPS
Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite

30 September 2004

When TRIPS was signed in 1994, the United States, Europe and Japan dominated the world's software, pharmaceutical, chemical and entertainment industries. The rest of the world had little to gain by agreeing to these terms of trade for intellectual property. They did so because a failure of democratic processes nationally and internationally enabled a small group of men within the United States to capture the US trade-agenda-setting process, to draft intellectual property principles that became the blueprint for TRIPS and to crush resistance through US trade power.

file icon32.TRIPS

A Decade After Cairo
Women's Health in a Free Market Economy
Sumati Nair and Preeti Kirbat with Sarah Sexton

16 June 2004

This briefing evaluates the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development. It assesses several processes that affect women's reproductive and sexual rights and health: the decline and collapse in health services; neo-liberal economic policies and religious fundamentalisms; and development policies underpinned by neo-Malthusianism.

file iconA Decade after Cairo

Trading Health Care Away?
GATS, Public Services and Privatisation
Sarah Sexton

31 July 2001

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is revising its General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) so as to increase international trade in services. If current proposals are implemented, GATS could be used to overturn almost any legislation governing services. Particularly under threat are public services -- health care, education, energy, water and sanitation. This briefing explores the potential for private companies to capture the most profitable components of publicly-provided and -funded health care services, leaving a reduced public sector to cope with the elderly, chronically sick and the poor who most need health care and who can least afford it.

file icon23.GATS

If Cloning is the Answer, What was the Question?
Power and Decision-Making in the Geneticisation of Health
Sarah Sexton

31 October 1999

Most discussions about human embryo cloning focus on ethics and potential health benefits. In the process, the many social, economic and environmental aspects of health and disease are increasingly hidden, while issues such as how the potential benefits of biotech would be obtained and distributed are sidelined. It has therefore become hard to raise key questions about the increased geneticisation of our lives and societies.

file icon16.Cloning