Access to medicines at prices that the patients can afford has been a recurrent concern for the global community ever since the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) was adopted as one of the covered agreements under the World Trade Organization (WTO). The TRIPS Agreement is a charter for strengthening intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection and enforcement and over the past 25 years, there are instances galore where holders of intellectual property (IP) have exercised their rights to extract exorbitant rents from the users…

India has become the world’s new hotspot of the Covid-19 pandemic as infection cases have surged in recent weeks. On September 7, India overtook Brazil with 4.2 million confirmed cases to become the country with the second-largest number of confirmed cases in the world. On September 16, the total number of confirmed cases surged past five million (Figure 1). If the current trend continues, India may soon become the world’s worst-hit country surpassing the US.

With more than 84,000 people succumbing to Covid-19 infection so far, India’s death toll has…

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877-1959), a British economist, is well known for his contributions to welfare economics. One of the most prolific writers of his time, Pigou wrote over a dozen books and more than 100 articles and pamphlets dealing with both theoretical and practical aspects of welfare economics. His writings cover a wide range of human welfare issues from unemployment to housing to taxation.

Some of his most famous books include Wealth and Welfare (1912), The Economics of Welfare (1920), A Capital Levy and a Levy on War Wealth (1920),…

Since May 2020, India and China have had the worst face-off in decades on the line of actual control in India’s far North, which was yet another stark reminder that the two most populous nations have an extremely fragile relationship. But when the 20 Indian soldiers lost their lives in the ensuing clashes with China’s People’s Liberation Army, the fault lines of India’s economic relationship with its northern neighbour became wide open. Passions are justifiably running high in India, leading to the demands for boycotting Chinese products and investments…

The decision of the Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Roberto Azevedo, to demit office a year before the expiration of his second term, confirms the long-held view that the multilateral trading system is facing an existential crisis. This rules-based trading system was established by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to create an open and a non-discriminatory trading system in order to raise standards of living, ensure full employment and support steadily growing volume of real income and effective demand.

However, there have been unmistakable signs…