Links

1. Tarun Jain (Indian School of Business) at Ideas for India: Should Bribe Givers Be Let Off?

   In 2011, Economist Kaushik Basu argued that for a class of bribes, the law should not punish the bribe-giver. This column presents results of experiments conducted to test this idea and provides insights for anti-corruption efforts.

2. Dirk Matten in Globe and Mail: India’s generics drug ruling will help, not hinder, innovation. He reiterates what I consider to be central to the Supreme Court verdict; Indian news outlets that I have seen seem to miss this point, though:

   The crucial point here is whether the version of Glivec for which Novartis was claiming patent protection is actually a ‘ new ‘ drug. What the Indian supreme court in fact ruled was not that Novartis should not enjoy patent protection on their new drugs; it mainly concluded that the new edition of Glivec, for which the company applied for protection, was in fact not sufficiently ‘new’ – not different enough from the old version of Glivec, for which the patent had expired.

   This points to a well know strategy of the pharmaceutical industry. Rather than fighting generic companies, ‘originator’ companies such as Novartis just marginally change the chemical formula of an existing drug whose patent is about to expire and then pretend to having come up with an entirely new one, for which of course they should enjoy full patent protection.

3. Brad Plumer at the Wonk Blog: Expensive batteries are holding back electric cars. Can that change? A part of the argument hinges on the lack of a Morre's Law in energy storage technology!