March 12, 2011
According to the Washington Post, multinational drug companies retaliated against India for having weak patent protections by pulling out of the country in the 1970s. The Post seems to imply that this decision could have been motivated by economics. That is not true. If a drug company is engaged in reverse engineering it gains no particular advantage from having the manufacturing facilities located within India. If drug companies left India because of its patent policy, as the Post claims, then the motivation was political — to pressure India to change the policy — not economic.
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