International trade agreements

The author is Project Director and a Chief Investigator under an Australian Research Council Grant to investigate the impact of international trade agreements on access to medicines in Australia. The ARC was not involved in the preparation of this chapter. 

Thomas A. Faunce holds a joint appointment as senior lecturer in the College of Law and Medical School at the Australian National University. His PhD was awarded the Crawford Prize at the ANU in 2002. He is currently Project Director of a three-year Australian Research Council grant investigating the impact of international trade agreements on Australian medicine policy. 

International Agreements The U.S. Government is a party to international trade agreements. In the United States, such trade agreements become... 

The principal international trade agreement is the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which entered into force on January 1,1948. GATT has since been amended several times following negotiation sessions known as rounds. 

At the time a U.S. patent was valid for 17 years from the date of issue. Subsequent international trade agreements have led to changes in the period of enforcement, and during the changeover period there have been some extensions to the terms of some existing patents. 

Table 4.1 The WTO boxes international trade agreements and agriculture (WTO 2001)...

In a recent article Oh and Karimi (2004) explore the effect of regulations (bilateral and multilateral international trade agreements, import tariffs, corporate taxes in different countries, etc.) on the capacity expansion problem. They point out that barring the work of Papageorgiou etal. (2001), who explore the effect of corporate taxes in the optimization of a supply chain for a pharmaceutical industry, very little attempt has been made to incorporate other regulatory issues in the capacity expansion problem. However, they point to other attempts in location-allocation problems and in production-distribution problems (Cohen etal., 1989 Arntzen etal., 1995 Goetschalckx etal, 2002), which include tariffs, duty drawbacks, local content rules, etc. for a multinational corporation. 

Fears have also been expressed that the material bans contained in the draft WEEE Directive would infringe international trade agreements. 

Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international trade agreement that is signed by 135 nations in 1973 and went into effect in 1975 (Image 115.3). 

Thus, international recognition of disease freedom has a role to play in facilitating safe trade, at international, regional and national levels. Furthermore, risk analysis has a more general role, outside the narrow confines of international trade agreements, in designing biosecurity tailored to the most important routes of disease introduction and surveillance systems for detecting any exotic disease incursion. 

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