About
Ken Shadlen is Professor of Development Studies in LSE’s Department of International Development.
Ken works on the comparative and international political economy of development, exploring the interaction between international changes and national political processes as states navigate the challenges of late development in the global economy. His main areas of research include the global and cross-national politics of intellectual property (IP), the politics of pharmaceutical and health regulation, and the dynamics of North-South trade agreements. He is the author of Coalitions and Compliance: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Patents in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2017) and multiple articles on the globalization of pharmaceutical patenting from the 1990s to the present.
He has conducted extensive research on the functioning of patent offices, analysing national differences in pharmaceutical patent examination outcomes. During the COVID-19 pandemic he published articles on innovation, production, and access to vaccines and therapeutics in The Lancet, Health Affairs, Social Science and Medicine, and Issues in Science and Technology. He is currently investigating cross-national variation in the promotion and regulation of “generic” drugs, the impact of pharmaceutical patenting in developing countries, and the political economy of licensing and technology transfer for production of therapeutics and vaccines.
Expertise
Latin America, World Trade Organization (WTO), debt and developing countries, industrial policy, intellectual property rights, international institutions, patents, pharmaceuticals, politics, trade and industrial strategy
Teaching
DV424 (International Institutions and Late Development)
DV458
DV473