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The Benefits Of Free Trade

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Those who oppose free trade do so because they view it in zero-sum terms instead of absolute terms. President Trump’s views on trade is similar to this zero-sum way of thinking. He claims that trade has decimated manufacturing in America, despite evidence that says that automation and productivity are the main culprits for this decline. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Douglas Irwin, points to “one representative study, by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, [that] found that pro¬ductivity growth accounted for more than 85 percent of the job loss in manufacturing between 2000 and 2010” (Irwin, 2016). The president also seems to not understand that trade lowers prices for consumers. A Mercatus Center paper …show more content…

This portion of the TPP “expand[s] the circumstances under which companies can be given new patents merely by making slight modifications to existing medicines, a practice known as “ever-greening” and puts competing, less government preferred drug companies at a disadvantage by barring them from “using existing clinical data on biological medicines’ safety and efficacy, even in the absence of patents” (“Q&A: The Trans-Pacific Partnership,” 2016). Another concern about the TPP is how it regulates copyright. Copyright holders, again per Human Right Watch, are given great discretion in making internet companies to take down material that is allegedly in breach of copyright; this process is not adjudicated (“Q&A: The Trans-Pacific Partnership,” 2016).
As stated above, how drug patents are handled is one of the more dubious aspects of the TPP. Originally, all members of the WTO (World Trade Organization) had to abide by what are known as TRIPS Agreements, or agreements related to intellectual property (Elliott & Bonin, 2002). TRIPs require states to follow the following: companies that patent the drug will have sole rights to their product, barring any company from using that product unless their use is granted by the patent holder, once the patent is filed and approved, the holders are entitled to keep that patent in their

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