The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) today released its 2007 National Trade Estimate Report (NTE), which details significant barriers to US trade and investment and the broad array of US actions to reduce and eliminate those barriers. Eight pages of the report deal with Israel and its trade barriers in agriculture, industry, services, investment, and standards certification. Considerable attention is devoted to intellectual property rights protection in the pharmaceutical industry.
The USTR says, “In April 2005, Israel adopted limited data exclusivity legislation that provided some new protection from unfair commercial use of the confidential test data of pharmaceutical firms. However, these data exclusivity provisions provide data protection periods that fall far short of the periods provided in OECD level economies, as well as other countries in the Middle East… Research and development, as well as clinical trial expenditures made by international pharmaceutical companies, have fallen in recent years as these companies have moved these activities to countries with more favorable data protection regimes.”
Pharma Israel - The Association of the Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies secretary general Tomer Feffer said that low protection for intellectual property rights, because of lobbying by special interest groups, was harming Israel’s trade relations. “The US and Europe are clearly telling Israel that its intellectual property protection are not complying with Israel’s international obligations. If Israel continues to ignore this matter, its position as far as research and innovation are concerned, especially in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, will worsen.”
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on April 4, 2007
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2007