Global, National, and Local Articulations: The Case of Pharmaceutical Policies in Argentina and Mexico

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Dr. Donna M. Goldstein, along with a health economist and two in-country collaborators, will undertake research that seeks to develop appropriate multi-level, interdisciplinary models for studying globalization. Their specific focus will be the case of pharmaceutical health care. They will study the provisioning of HIV/AIDS medication to infected local populations. Governments of developing countries that support inclusive health care policies are caught between the demands of intellectual property law, the strength of global and national pharmaceutical lobbies, and the growing demands of well-organized AIDS activists. Through the collection and analysis of comparative economic and ethnographic evidence, the current project seeks to evaluate how forces acting on different levels -- global, natational, and local -- play out in pharmaceutical negotiation processes as they materialize within two metropolitan areas: Buenos Aires and Mexico City. This pilot phase of the project will focus on four kinds of stakeholders: (1)transnational pharmaceutical corporations producing HIV/AIDS drugs, (2) generic producers of HIV/AIDS drugs, (3) HIV/AIDS activists who lobby the federal government, and (4)HIV/AIDS activists who mainly provide services and do not lobby the federal government, plus two ethnographic case studies of ongoing pharmaceutical negotiations. The data collected will be used to answer the central questions regarding pharmaceutical policies in Latin America: What forces play into pharmaceutical negotiations in developing countries such as Argentina and Mexico? What role do pharmaceutical companies and HIV/AIDS activists play in national contexts with regard to the consideration of international regulatory bodies and intellectual patent law?The research is important because while globalization is frequently cited as a major force affecting people's lives all over the world, how it comes to bear through the many intervening levels is not well understood. This research will make those links clear and help to develop models that can be used by other researchers in other contexts. The research also will contribute to understanding the consequences of recent legal changes for HIV/AIDS care in developing countries, and will foster international research cooperation.