This paper reviews almost twenty years of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) work on access to medicines. The UNHRC has repeatedly framed access to medicines as part of the right to health and has urged States to rely on flexibilities in the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of...

This paper calls for a comprehensive, development-focused review of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) under Article 71.1, a process that has been mandated but never carried out. It critiques the narrow, compliance-driven approach favored by...

This paper provides the first quantitative analysis of optimal patent policy in trading economies. We develop a new framework that combines trade and growth theory into a tractable quantitative model, which we estimate to match patent and trade data. Counterfactual analysis yields three main...

This Research Paper addresses the growing problem of access to essential medicines, focusing on the role of intellectual property rights, particularly patent rights, in restricting access by enabling pharmaceutical market monopolies that keep drug prices high. The paper explores the Bolar...

This paper analyzes the provisions of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) on industrial designs, and the manner in which the narrow aspects dealt with by the Agreement have been addressed by European Union (EU) legislation. The paper...

This publication contains the text of the WTO's founding agreement, the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, and its Annexes, including all amendments and additions since its entry into force up to and including September 2025. These include an amendment to the...