Studies have shown that drinking one glass of red wine per day may help prevent heart
disease. Assume this is true, and a fungal disease destroys a large portion of the grape
harvest of California vineyards. In the market for red wine, these two developments
would
A) increase demand and increase supply, resulting in an increase in the equilibrium
quantity and a decrease in the equilibrium price of red wine.
B) increase demand and decrease supply resulting in a decrease in both the equilibrium
quantity and the equilibrium price of red wine.
C) increase demand and decrease supply, resulting in an increase in the equilibrium
price and an uncertain effect on the equilibrium quantity of red wine.
D) increase demand and decrease supply, resulting in an increase in both the
equilibrium price and the equilibrium quantity of red wine.
Article Summary
Since 2008, the United States has been involved in trade negotiations over the
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement with 11 other countries on both
sides of the Pacific Ocean. One area of the negotiations involves patents and intellectual
property rights in the pharmaceutical industry. A number of developing countries have
ignored international agreements concerning patents and intellectual property rights as a
way to benefit their domestic pharmaceutical industries, to the detriment of those
companies which have spent considerable time and money developing new medicines.
For every 5,000 to 10,000 experimental drugs contemplated, only one will typically
gain FDA approval, and this occurs only after up to 15 years of research at an average
cost of more than $1 billion. Also, 30 percent of the U.S. workforce is either directly or
indirectly employed in the pharmaceutical industry, so protection of these intellectual
property rights is very important for the U.S. economy.