Ken Shadlen
Professor of Development Studies
Professor Shadlen works on the comparative and international political economy of development. His research on the global and cross-national politics of intellectual property brought him to India. He has two ongoing projects that involve research in (and about) India. The first is a STICERD-funded project (“Pharmaceutical Patents, Industry Transformation, and the Supply of Generic Drugs,” with Chirantan Chatterjee, IIM-Bangalore) which examines changing dynamics in the Indian pharmaceutical industry. The starting point is India's well-known role as provider of affordable, quality, non-patented drugs to developing countries. The project examines whether the introduction of pharmaceutical patents in India since 2005 plus incentives to compete in the more regulated and more lucrative OECD markets will reorient Indian firms away from developing countries (and the drugs needed by poor people in poor countries) and toward developed countries (and the drugs demanded in such markets). And as some firms shift their orientation, the project examines whether new firms fill the gap in supply. The second project involving India is ESRC-funded (“TRIPS Implementation and Secondary Pharmaceutical Patenting: An Empirical Analysis," with Bhaven Sampat, Columbia University), and examines how and to what extent countries' different approaches to pharmaceutical patents yield different outcomes in terms of levels of patent protection and degrees of generic pharmaceutical competition. The project focuses on a set of developing countries that adopted specific mechanisms to limit the grant of "secondary patents" in pharmaceuticals.