TRIPS Agreement

context: en: After the Uruguay round, the GATT became the basis for the establishment of the World Trade Organization.  Because ratification of TRIPS is a compulsory requirement of World Trade Organization membership, any country seeking to obtain hard access to the numerous international markets opened by the World Trade Organization must enact the strict intellectual property laws mandated by TRIPS.  For this reason, TRIPS is the most important multilateral instrument for the globalization of intellectual property laws.  States like Russia and China, that were very unlikely to join the Berne Convention have found the prospect of WTO membership a powerful enticement.
qas: question: zh_tw: 如果一個國家想加入 WTO，必須簽署什麼？
answers: en: text: TRIPS

context: en: Since TRIPS came into force, it has been subject to criticism from developing countries, academics, and non-governmental organizations. Though some of this criticism is against the WTO generally, many advocates of trade liberalisation also regard TRIPS as poor policy. TRIPS's wealth concentration effects (moving money from people in developing countries to copyright and patent owners in developed countries) and its imposition of artificial scarcity on the citizens of countries that would otherwise have had weaker intellectual property laws, are common bases for such criticisms. Other criticism has focused on the failure of TRIPS to accelerate investment and technology flows to low-income countries, a benefit advanced by WTO members in the lead-up to the agreement's formation. Statements by the World Bank indicate that TRIPS has not led to a demonstrable acceleration of investment to low-income countries, though it may have done so for middle-income countries. Lengthy patent periods under TRIPs have been scrutinised for unduly slowing the entry of generic substitutes and competition to the market. In particular, the illegality of pre-clinical trials or submission of samples for approval until a patent expires have been blamed for driving the growth of a few multinationals, rather than developing country producers.
qas: question: zh_tw: 世界上哪些國家對 TRIPS 的批評最為嚴厲？
answers: en: text: developing countries

context: en: TRIPS was negotiated during the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1984-1994.   Its inclusion was the culmination of a program of intense lobbying by the United States, supported by the European Union, Japan and other developed nations.  Campaigns of unilateral economic encouragement under the Generalized System of Preferences and coercion under Section 301 of the Trade Act played an important role in defeating competing policy positions that were favored by developing countries like Brazil, but also including Thailand, India and Caribbean Basin states.  In turn, the United States strategy of linking trade policy to intellectual property standards can be traced back to the entrepreneurship of senior management at Pfizer in the early 1980s, who mobilized corporations in the United States and made maximizing intellectual property privileges the number one priority of trade policy in the United States (Braithwaite and Drahos, 2000, Chapter 7).
qas: question: zh_tw: 哪些國家支援 TRIPS 的訂立？
answers: en: text: United States, supported by the European Union, Japan and other developed nations