TY - JOUR AU - Gleeson, Deborah AU - Lexchin, Joel AU - Labonté, Ronald AU - Townsend, Belinda AU - Gagnon, Marc-André AU - Kohler, Jillian AU - Forman, Lisa AU - Shadlen, Kenneth C. PY - 2019 DA - 2019/11/28 TI - Analyzing the impact of trade and investment agreements on pharmaceutical policy: provisions, pathways and potential impacts JO - Globalization and Health SP - 78 VL - 15 IS - 1 AB - Trade and investment agreements negotiated after the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have included increasingly elevated protection of intellectual property rights along with an expanding array of rules impacting many aspects of pharmaceutical policy. Despite the large body of literature on intellectual property and access to affordable medicines, the ways in which other provisions in trade agreements can affect pharmaceutical policy and, in turn, access to medicines have been little studied. There is a need for an analytical framework covering the full range of provisions, pathways, and potential impacts, on which to base future health and human rights impact assessment and research. A framework exploring the ways in which trade and investment agreements may affect pharmaceutical policy was developed, based on an analysis of four recently negotiated regional trade agreements. First a set of core pharmaceutical policy objectives based on international consensus was identified. A systematic comparative analysis of the publicly available legal texts of the four agreements was undertaken, and the potential impacts of the provisions in these agreements on the core pharmaceutical policy objectives were traced through an analysis of possible pathways. SN - 1744-8603 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-019-0518-2 DO - 10.1186/s12992-019-0518-2 ID - Gleeson2019 ER -