Medicating the salaryman lifestyle: fear-based marketing of liver stimulant drugs in postwar Japan

This article studies the heretofore unexplored fear-based print marketing campaigns for postwar hangover remedies and liver drugs sold by Japan's leading drug manufacturers of the 1950s, including Chūgai, Takeda, Tanabe, Sankyō, and Yamanouchi. It reveals that these drugs were creatively and predatorily marketed to salarymen and their wives in hundreds of newspaper and magazine ads that raised the spectre of liver damage and related diseases due to overconsumption of alcohol and tobacco. It demonstrates that the makers claimed not only that their formulations could remedy liver damage, but could even serve as prophylactics that would guard against the dangers of alcohol and nicotine poisoning and enable users to drink and smoke to excess without fear. The robust copy and clever imagery appearing in the ads also illustrate the social pressures facing salarymen to drink with colleagues after work on an almost nightly basis, as well as at a series of seasonal office parties and gatherings throughout the year. This article is the first to examine how drug makers took aim at some of postwar Japan's leading causes of ill health, alcohol and tobacco abuse, as well as chemical poisonings and even morning sickness, by selling an array of ineffectual drugs based on untested and dubious claims. It charts the drug makers' increasingly outlandish ads, the slow realization that their drugs were potentially hazardous, and their swift withdrawal from the market by 1960. It argues that, amidst a rise in alcohol overconsumption and comparatively lax testing and marketing regulations, Japan's postwar pharmaceutical firms exaggerated and preyed upon consumer health concerns in hundreds of frightening and pseudoscientific ads for largely untested and potentially hazardous drugs.     

Indian health diplomacy in East Africa: Exploring the potential in pharmaceutical manufacturing

Indian engagement in East Africa’s health sector is multifaceted, comprehensive and involves national and subnational actors. It includes exports of low cost generics, building health infrastructure, aid, technical assistance and hosting medical tourists among others. This paper, based on extensive fieldwork conducted with multiple stakeholders in Kenya and Ethiopia, provides an overview of the various components of India’s co-operation in the East African health sector and identifies pharmaceutical manufacturing as a space for Indian actors to leverage their strengths. It focuses on two case studies of manufacturers: a third-generation company in Kenya owned by members of the Indian diaspora, and a newly formed subsidiary of an Indian corporation in Ethiopia. These case studies inform the larger debate on India’s health diplomacy on the continent and the myriad ways in which the Indian state as well as corporates can enhance existing co-operation.     

Approval regulation and endogenous consumer confidence: Theory and analogies to licensing,safety, and financial regulation

Safety regulation – in the form of pre-market approval, licensure, screening, and product entry limitations – governs numerous market realms, including consumer finance. In this article, we ask whether the effects of safety regulation go beyond safety and affect consumers' beliefs about the distribution of products they can use. We model “approval regulation,” where a government regulator must approve the market entry of a product based upon observable, unbiased, and non-anticipable experiments. We show that even if regulator and firm disagree about only quality standards, the disagreement induces the firm to provide more information about its product than it would in the absence of regulation. Put differently, purely first-order disagreements in regulation generate second-order consequences (more certainty about product quality). These second-order consequences of regulation are sufficient to generate first-order effects among end-users (more consumption of superior products), even when users are risk-neutral. In other words, even if approval regulation produces little or no improvement in safety or quality, it still aggregates information useful to “downstream” product users; these users will exhibit higher consumption and will more readily switch to superior products. In contrast with libertarian analyses of entry regulation and licensure, the model predicts that entry restrictions may be associated with greater product or service utilization (consumption) as well as with greater price sensitivity among consumers. Because contemporary cost–benefit analyses ignore these second-order effects, they are unlikely to capture the possible confidence effects of approval regulation.