The rest of the world takes from Africa much more than the continent receives. Almost $60 billion more. $192 billion flows out of Africa each year. This report outlines the range of different flows draining out of Africa, as well as the costs imposed on the continent as a result of climate change and explores the reasons for this. Curbing illicit financial flows is argued to demand greater transparency and accountability in the global financial system. This would involve clamping down on shell corporations; improved disclosure of beneficial owners of companies; stricter company
reporting regulations on sales, profits and taxes; and exchanging tax information across borders. Instead of talking about ‘good governance in Africa’ the authors argue that Northern countries must take the lead to reduce the mass extraction of African capital that embeds poverty and inequality, including revenue leakages from extractive industries and fairer trade practices between African countries and MNCs.
Health equity in economic and trade policies
The author asserts "there will be no drilling in paradise". Soco International, a British oil company, has abandoned plans to drill for oil in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The park is a World Heritage Site, and UNESCO says it is Africa's richest trove of natural beauty and biodiversity. Soco will leave in about a month, after completing a seismic survey of the park's Lake Edward, where drilling was to have commenced. Tens of thousands of local people depend on the lake for fish, and it is also home to thousands of hippopotamuses. Soco has vowed not to drill in the park without permission from UNESCO, and to keep out of all the world's 981 World Heritage Sites. The firm was under pressure after an expert report last month on the status of the park. French company Total pulled out last year. The DRC government has yet to remove overall permission for oil companies to search and drill for oil in the park.
The authors have done a comparative study of revenue allocation in mineral-rich contexts, looking at existing criteria and reform modalities adopted to allocate and use EI revenues and examining the political bargains that enabled such distribution. The authors contend that two factors are crucially important - and explanatory of - devolution of revenues to subnational jurisdictions: the bargaining power of subnational actors as well as their connectedness to the central politics.
International policy towards access to essential medicines in Africa has focused until recently on international procurement of large volumes of medicines, mainly from Indian manufacturers, and their import and distribution. This emphasis is now being challenged by renewed policy interest in the potential benefits of local pharmaceutical production and supply. However, there is a shortage of evidence on the role of locally produced medicines in African markets, and on potential benefits of local production for access to medicines. This article contributes to filling that gap. This article uses WHO/HAI data from Tanzania for 2006 and 2009 on prices and sources of a set of tracer essential medicines. It employs innovative graphical methods of analysis alongside conventional statistical testing. Medicines produced in Tanzania were equally likely to be found in rural and in urban areas. Imported medicines, especially those imported from countries other than Kenya (mainly from India) displayed 'urban bias?: that is, they were significantly more likely to be available in urban than in rural areas. This finding holds across the range of sample medicines studied, and cannot be explained by price differences alone. While different private distribution networks for essential medicines may provide part of the explanation, this cannot explain why the urban bias in availability of imported medicines is also found in the public sector. The findings suggest that enhanced local production may improve rural access to medicines. The potential benefits of local production and scope for their improvement are an important field for further research, and indicate a key policy area in which economic development and health care objectives may reinforce each other.
The authors assert that the World Bank is a structural driver of the land grabs that is dispossessing and impoverishing rural communities across the globe and a central player that is using its financial and political might to force developing countries to follow a pre-prescribed model of development, based on the neoliberal principles of privatization, deregulation, low corporate taxation and ‘free market’ fundamentalism. At the demand of the G8 in 2012, and with funding from the Gates Foundation, the UK, US, Dutch, and Danish governments, the World Bank is now reported to be developing a new instrument to benchmark the business of agriculture (BBA). Started in late 2013, pilot studies are now underway in 10 countries, to be scaled up to 40 countries in 2014.The BBA builds on the Doing Business model and adapts it to agriculture. Despite a language that claims concerns for small- farmers, the goal of this new agriculture-focused ranking system is argued to aim at further opening countries’ agricultural sectors to foreign corporations. CODESRIA report the launch of a campaign to stop the Doing Business ranking. This is the ask of the OUR LAND, OUR BUSINESS campaign.
Many African countries, if not all, are located at the extreme end of what Immanuel Wallerstein thirty years ago termed the core-periphery relationship, a position which impoverishes them to the advantage of rich and industrialised countries in the core. In this paper the author argues that BRICS countries represent sub-imperialists trying to improve their relative location in the world system, perhaps moving toward imperialist power and thereafter even to imperialist superpower status. These countries have different levels of economic development and political influence, vested interests in the African continent and the DRC in particular, and geopolitical positions in world politics. But they all share four characteristics. First, BRICS countries present important opportunities for foreign direct investment that also impoverish people through dispossession of natural resources with little or no compensation, unequal shares of the costs and benefits of mega development projects, repayments of debts incurred to build these projects, and structural exclusion from accessing the outcomes of these initiatives. Second, BRICS countries are argued to share the same modus operandi: accumulation by dispossession. Third, BRICS countries are argued to share the same interests in natural resources including but not limited to mining, gas, oil and mega-dam projects for water and for electricity to meet their increasing demands for cheap and abundant electricity. Fourth, BRICS countries are argued to have poor records of environmental regulation, with virtually no commitment to mitigate climate change and invest in truly renewable energy, to take environmental impact assessments seriously, and to consult with and compensate adversely affected communities.
Africa has the highest disease burden in the world and continues to depend on pharmaceutical imports to meet public health needs. As Asian manufacturers of generic medicines begin to operate under a more protectionist intellectual property regime, their ability to manufacture medicines at prices that are affordable to poorer countries is becoming more circumscribed. The Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health gives member states of the World Trade Organization (WTO) the right to adopt legislation permitting the use of patented material without authorization by the patent holder, a provision known as "compulsory licensing". For African countries to take full advantage of compulsory licensing they must develop substantial local manufacturing capacity. Because building manufacturing capacity in each African country is daunting and almost illusory, the author argues that an African free trade area should be developed to serve as a platform not only for the free movement of goods made pursuant to compulsory licences, but also for an economic or financial collaboration towards the development of strong pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity in the continent. Most countries in Africa are in the United Nations list of least developed countries, and this allows them, under WTO law, to refuse to grant patents for pharmaceuticals until 2021. Thus, the author argues that there is a compelling need for African countries to collaborate to build strong pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity in the continent now, while the current flexibilities in international intellectual property law offer considerable benefits.
This paper presents a comprehensive mapping of governance efforts by international organizations to address counterfeit medicines, including analysis of related international treaties and conventions that may be applicable to anticounterfeit efforts. The paper reviews governance and global health diplomacy proposals from the literature that addresses counterfeit medicines. A number of international organizations have become active in addressing the global trade of counterfeit medicines. However, governance approaches by international organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Interpol and the World Customs Organization (WCO), have varied in scope and effectiveness. The authors argue that treaty instruments with applicability to counterfeit medicines have not been fully leveraged to combat this issue and argue that a formalized and multi-stakeholder governance mechanism is needed to address the issue, and that the UNODC should convene it.
By any reasonable definition, the majority of humanity is on the rack of poverty; and a major obstacle to its eradication is the growing threat of extreme and irreversible climate change. The coexistence of a chronic crisis of serious under-consumption for most with an increasingly critical environmental crisis resulting from over-consumption in aggregate can only be explained by extreme inequality in the global distribution of income. Resolving both simultaneously, as envisaged in the Post-2015 Agenda, requires a fundamental reconsideration of the nature and objectives of economic policy, and of the global economic system. The lecture discusses the extent and implications of global inequality, before building on a number of working hypotheses to outline an alternative model of economic development more conducive to the achievement of these two most fundamental global goals.
This work is a review of public sources including white papers, news and peer-reviewed literature with a focus on mainstream approaches used by the pharmaceutical industry (such as unaffordable price premiums for innovative medicines) and governments (such as denial of intellectual property rights) to support their interests. The authors also explore the implications of possible approaches on pharmaceutical policy in the context of global health diplomacy. The latter is a requirement for universal health coverage given the increasing power of state and non-state actors in emerging markets. The authors conclude that evidence and due processes, through inclusive and transparent priority-setting mechanisms, offer a reconciliatory way forward for both parties. Value-based pricing, underpinned by Health Technology Assessment (HTA), could leverage global health diplomacy to set priorities and resolve the perhaps unsustainable status quo. HTA is itself a diplomatic, consensus building and evidence-based approach that can help diffuse the current tension, enhance mutual understanding and perhaps help strengthen (or even mend) the current model of product development. Value-based pricing and HTA offer a potential priority setting mechanism that can serve as a transparent, non-adversarial platform for governments and the pharmaceutical industry to engage with each other and work towards enhancing access to medicines. Further quantitative research, exploring the impact of different policy-setting approaches by governments on medicine access using HTA, would strengthen this discourse.