The Role of Patents in the Latin American Development: ‘Models of Protection’ of pharmaceutical patents and access to medicines in Brazil, Chile and Venezuela Access to medicines, pharmaceutical patents, and public health are topics often addressed in the news. On the one hand, there is an imperative need to tackle pressing health concerns, and on the other hand, it is also important to provide adequate incentives to carry out research and development. Even though common health concerns exist within the developing world, each country has a different set of needs. The approach to solve or the strategies to balance intellectual property rights and access to medicines vary at large. Latin American countries i.e. Brazil, Chile and Venezuela, even though geographically located in the same continent, deal with the challenges in a different and unique manner. Before the TRIPS Agreement countries had the freedom to decide on whether or not to grant patent protection for medicines. Thus, most of the developing and least developed countries, now WTO member countries, did not provide patent protection for pharmaceuticals because they feared that patent protection would increase the price of pharmaceuticals, and hence, become an obstacle for the access to medicines. On the one hand, patent protection represents an incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to carry out R&D for new and needed drugs. But on the other hand, patents, as the system of financing R&D, has been regarded as a flawed system due to the high costs transferred to the finalised product (medicine) thus deterring access to medicines. Patent protection allows the inventor to prevent others from making use, selling, producing or distributing the invention without his consent for a period of no less than 20 years. Moreover, these rights conferred by the patent grant seem to constitute the pharmaceutical industry’s incentive to recoup the high costs associated with the R&D of a new drug. This book reviews the strategies or models of protection used in Brazil, Chile and Venezuela to balance both intellectual property rights (pharmaceutical patents) and access to medicines. Each country seems to have shaped their policies in accordance with their national priorities, whether these are motivated by health, political or commercial issues. This study portrays the different approaches followed in different national contexts despite all three having to implement the minimum standards of intellectual property protection according to the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). The outcome of the comparison of the policy implementations and the patterns followed by each of the analysed countries is without a doubt the main contribution of this academic study.

Much of the analysis of industrial organization implicitly assumes that firms sell directly to final consumers. However, many firms do not sell directly to the final consumers, but rather use intermediaries, such as wholesalers and retailers to distribute their products. The presence of such intermediaries affects significantly market outcomes. In particular, the contracts between manufacturers and retailers may significantly affect market outcomes, e.g. volumes and prices. Characteristic for these contracts is that they may contain vertical restraints, restrictions on what the retailers may do once they have acquired the products for resell. Another characteristic feature of these contracts is that they are typically devised by sophisticated contracting parties, who have strategic objectives. The reason for manufacturers, or upstream firms to impose vertical restraints on retailers, or downstream firms is that the actions of the downstream firms affect the upstream firm’s profits. While vertical restraints may affect the profitability of the contracting parties, they may also affect other agents, such as consumers and suppliers. In this dissertation I focus on three distinct aspects of vertical relations. I look at how providers of payment cards affect competition between retailers, through the no surcharge rule; how suppliers can expand their output by financing the establishment of new retailers; and how buyer alliances can extract surplus from suppliers through the use of market share contracts. Common to these essays is the strategic behavior by agents on one level affecting market outcomes at another vertical level.

Asset pricing as a subject is a quest to rationalize different prices associated with different assets that are on offer in financial markets. It does so, using a set of assumptions to mathematically model investors’ behavior, over a set of alternative choices, each leading to an uncertain future outcome. Under this scenario, investors make a choice of foregoing a part of today’s consumption for tomorrow in a way that marginal utility of loss of consumption today is equal to marginal gain in utility tomorrow. This equivalence theoretically determines asset prices. Therefore, there is only one prediction in asset pricing: asset returns must line up with the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) that they provide to the investors. This thesis is an attempt to map in particular the theoretical MRS with empirically available proxies of liquidity risk for small-sized developed markets. In the first essay a number of asset pricing models are tested for the Finnish market. Generally, the results differ in comparison with other markets. For the small Finnish market the significance and size of many risk factors change once equally or value weighted portfolio returns are used. However, the Carhart (1997) model is by far the best performing model for both equally and value weighted portfolios. Once the Capital Asset Pricing model is conditioned with a January dummy the model becomes significant for value weighted portfolios, whereas conditioned with an illiquidity factor, returns are better explained for equally weighted portfolios. The other essays summarize the effect of illiquidity for the Finnish and Nordic equity markets. The proposition that illiquidity matters for illiquid markets is sufficiently fulfilled. In one article we find that of the total return differential between the most illiquid and liquid assets, up to 92% is explained by the liquidity risk factor. For the U.S market the corresponding percentage is 17. Further, the illiquidity factor explains more than the CAPM model. There is also ample evidence that the single most successful illiquidity factor has explanatory capacity that is comparable to that of the three or four factor models of Fama and French (1993) and Carhart (1997) respectively. Finally, illiquidity appears to be important for all the Nordic equity markets. However, this evidence is not revealed using commonly proposed measures of illiquidity. Only when the proposed measure of illiquidity accounts for non-trading intervals and speed of trading, it is found that liquidity risk is linked with expected returns in the Nordic markets.

Real-life experiences of corporate mergers often tell of disappointment in terms of the synergistic benefits that fail to appear, or the severe organisational problems that arise. Although many studies have provided empirical material on internal divisions among actors coming from the previously separate organisations, we still know little about the sociopolitical forces at work in the upper echelons of corporate hierarchies. It is suggested in this paper that an examination of the emergent role identities in the upper echelons of a new corporate hierarchy can help us to understand the nature of these sociopolitical forces. The empirical analysis concentrates on a revealing merger case where Finnish Ovako and Swedish SKF Steel first joined forces, but where their organisational marriage broke down five years later. This analysis illustrates how behaviour consistent with the enacted role identities can create contradictory sociopolitical forces, and how this can lead to increasing tension and severe open conflict. The analysis suggests that a favourable turn in the business cycle is a condition that can easily hide such divisions with dramatic consequences later on.