Big Pharma's Internationalization of R&D to China

China's increasing integration into the global pharmaceutical value chain is occurring at a time when big pharma's traditional R&D model has entered a period of crisis, and when China faces significant challenges in providing healthcare for its huge and rapidly ageing population. Despite China's ambitions of promoting its own pharmaceutical sector, it is likely to continue to depend for some time on significant contributions from foreign companies. While this situation provides considerable opportunities for big pharma companies to expand their markets in China, they are also hoping that offshoring aspects of their R&D to China may contribute to reconfiguring their current R&D model with its weak record of producing new drugs. Drawing on interviews with a small number of pharma R&D centres in Shanghai, patent analyses and industry reports, we provide insights into both the challenges and the opportunities associated with the early stages of establishing such centres in an emerging region with a rapidly growing market. This paper contributes towards a more nuanced view of the internationalization of R&D in emerging regions.     

“Birtherism” and Anti-Blackness: The Anti-Islamic Ante-Life of Africanized Slavery

The first black President of the United States, Barack Obama, entered office on a wave of racial optimism. But rather than transcending the United States’ racialized history, Obama's presidency has in a sense “outed” it, exposing this history's anti-Islamic origins. This article establishes a link between anti-blackness and the Islamophobic reaction to his election: late medieval and early modern European Christians could classify newly Africanized peoples as uniquely and ontologically enslaveable only because they previously had imagined Muslims as such.     

How well are Europe's rural businesses connected to the digital economy?

As economic activity becomes increasingly globalized, partly by means of new information and communication technologies (ICTs), one of the key expectations of European policy-makers was that businesses in rural regions, and particularly in peripheral rural regions, would overcome some of the disadvantages of their locational contexts, and become more effective participants in larger market areas. This paper examines the reality of ICT exploitation by rural business across Europe, based on a survey of 600 enterprises in 12 regions located in Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Spain, Greece and Finland. Not surprisingly, a range of outcomes has been identified in terms of telecommunications infrastructure and ICT usage, which reflect considerable differences in access to reasonably priced broadband telecommunications, awareness of how the technologies can be exploited, and in levels of skills to translate that exploitation into a means of competitiveness.     

Book reviews

New works in geography

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. Gregory A. Barton. Pp. xiii + 192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0 521 81417 0 (hbk).

Claiming Rural Identities: Dynamics, Contexts, Policies. Tialda Haartsen, Peter Groote &; Paulus P.P. Huigen (eds). Pp. viii + 166. Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000. Price €17.02, ISBN 90 232 3567 3 (pbk).

Geographies of Health. Anthony C. Gatrell. Pp. xv + 294. Oxford: Blackwell. 2002. Price £16.99 (pbk), ISBN 0 631 21985 4 (pbk).

The Peopling of Britain: The Shaping of the Human Landscape. Paul Slack and Ryk Ward (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002. Price £50.00 (hbk), ISBN 0 19 829759 9 (hbk).

Focus on Scotland

William Speirs Bruce: Polar Explorer and Scottish Nationalist. Peter Speak. Pp. 144. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland Publishing, 2003. Price £9.99 (pbk), ISBN 1 901663 71 X (pbk).     

Political information among first‐year Australian politics students: Queensland

This paper is a preliminary investigation into the process of acquiring political information. Data are derived from a survey of students enrolling in the introductory Australian politics course at the University of Queensland in 1980 and compared with similar data from earlier surveys at two NSW Universities. Two types of political information are distinguished—information about political institutions and recognition of political figures. The effects of ten independent variables are shown to be different for the two types of political information. It is hypothesized that information about political institutions is dependent primarily on attitudes towards politics, while recognition of political figures is dependent primarily on exposure to information about them. Sex of the respondents is found to have a powerful and independent effect on both types of political information.     

Reviews and book notes

The Philosophy of Money, by Georg Simmel, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978, pp. 512. £12.50.

Jean Holmes and Campbell Sharman, The Australian Federal System (Allen and Unwin: 1977).

? Royal Institute of Public Administration National Monograph Series Nos. 1–4, all published by National Council, Royal Institute of Public Administration, Brisbane:.

1. Helen Dent, Stuart Hamilton, Sue Hamilton, Trevor Matthews: Index to the Report of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration, 1977, pp. 31, $1.95 posted.

2. Michael Court: Towards a Nationally Integrated Health‐Welfare System for Australia, 1977, pp. 47, $2.95 posted.

3. Nancy Viviani and Peter Wilenski: The Australian Development Assistance Agency — A Post‐Mortem Report, 1978, pp. 29, $3.50 posted.

4. Bernard Schaffer and Elizabeth O'Keeffe: People and Agencies, 1978, pp. 58, $3.30 posted.

Australasian Political Studies Association, Australian Labor Party — National Committee of Inquiry Discussion Papers. APSA Monograph No. 23, 1979. $5.00.

John Summers, Dennis Woodward and Andrew Parkins (eds), Government, Politics and Power in Australia, Flinders University of SA, 1979.

Broido, Vera, Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II, Maurice Temple Smith, London, and ANU Press, Canberra, 1979, 238 pp.