Exactly—please point to a pharma company that is doing original R&D and creating important products in a country where IP protections are weak.

This is the correlation-causation confusion again. Some countries have big pharma companies, others don't. Big pharma companies can spend more on research as well as on lobbying to maintain over-the-top “IP” protections.

The flaw in your reasoning is seeing the presence or absence of IP protection as an independent variable, and level of R&D as a function of that. I think both are dependent on the amount of cash pharma companies have to spend.

> but that's an opinion as is yours.

Indeed, and that is precisely why I want acceptable mechanisms to test the hypothesis and correct for it, adapt the estimates etc (all mentioned in the comment that you are responding to). The fix seems far from arbitrary blanket protection from market pressures. Just like so many other things the market needs to be actively co-opted into the mix to set the prices right, rather than being cordoned off.

> Nor has the opposite been tested

BTW I did not imply any direction in the test, so "opposite" does not quite apply as an adjective to the tests I have in mind. Perhaps "estimation" would have been a better word