by Vanora Bennett, TES Contributor Climate change attracts two kinds of opinion, it would seem: reasonable and other. In the first category, Gillian Tett argues in the Financial Times that central banks are slowly recognizing that global warming is a financial stability risk. End-March San Francisco Federal Reserve board’s economics letter argues […]
Author: Erik Sass
DELINKAGE: CAN PRIZES REPLACE PATENTS FOR MEDICINE INNOVATION?
By Philip Stevens, Executive Director, Geneva Network Republished with permission of the Geneva Network. Original available here. The patent-based system of drug development comes under further pressure from key countries aiming to increase access to medicines at a joint World Health Organization and Government of India meeting in New Delhi this week. […]
Knowledge Economy Must Be At The Heart Of WTO’s Reform Agenda
Knowledge Economy Must Be At The Heart Of WTO’s Reform Agenda By Philip Stevens, Executive Director, the Geneva Network Republished with permission of the Geneva Network. Original available here. Trade tensions between the US and China continue to escalate and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the global forum of […]
Bilateral development finance is basically just commercial EM investment
By Adrian Fielding, TES Contributor In a job interview in 2015 with a development finance institution (DFI) that will remain unnamed, my response to the question ‘what do you think we do here?’ went something like this: development finance institutions’ raison d’être is the de-risking of potentially highly-transformational projects or the financing of […]
NHS failing teens with mental health needs
The number of UK teens requesting help for anxiety has increased by a third in just the past two years, and NHS has yet to respond with more funding or support for adolescent mental health. In the BMJ, Collette Isabel Stadler calls out the NHS for its shoddy target-setting: by 2021, NHS aims to ensure […]
The market for antibiotics is a “disaster”
The Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar is all but begging for action to shore up the failing antibiotics market. Decades of weak investment in antibiotics has left “perilously few” companies involved in antibiotic development—a market crisis unfolding alongside the rise of deadly drug-resistant superbugs. Farrar warns that there is currently no viable pathway to market […]
Sino-swine fever raises pork prices… and transparency concerns
One-third of China’s pig herd–130 million pigs—is infected with African swine fever, and the government is being less than transparent about it. But it’s not the usual Beijing blackout. In this case, it actually appears that decentralization is partly responsible for the worrisome secrecy, with the central Ministry of Health politically subservient to […]
Brexit: More Kafka or Monty Python?
By Vanora Bennett, TES Europe Editor Like a bad dream or late era Monty Python sketch, the slow-motion insanity that is Brexit continues with no end in sight. No option appears to command sufficient support in Parliament, reflecting the irreconcilable demands of multiple opposing factions […]
The B-word and two R-words: Remain and Reform
by Vanora Bennett, TES Contributor The news that comes out of the radio and TV in and on Britain these days can be summarized in one B-word, and it’s not Brexit. It’s bewilderment. The same Brexit phrases and slogans are endlessly repeated: amendment, amendment, parliamentary recess, amendment, the people have spoken, amendment, 17.4 […]
Trump: EU Must Include Ag In Trade Deal. Europe: Arched Eyebrow
Anyone hoping for a quick U.S.-EU trade deal should start adjusting their expectations for a somewhat slower pace, perhaps “glacial.” The negotiations concerning negotiations for a new trade agreement – attempting to reach agreement on what will be discussed in the negotiations, principally which categories of product and service should be included – are […]