Then you're essentially outsourcing medical testing to poorer countries with corruption problems. Many of the massive costs of developing drugs come in the mass

Then you're essentially outsourcing medical testing to poorer countries with corruption problems. Many of the massive costs of developing drugs come in the massive trials required to get Western approval - running those trials abroad, but to a standard required to get FDA approval probably won't save that much money. Drug development being guided by market forces works, government bodies tend to have a very poor record when it comes to picking winners, even worse at an international level. Global medical coordination's problems can be seen in the WHO's current problems. Drug companies want to maximise their profit. They understand the basics of economics, the supply / demand curve, and that selling lots in poorer countries is better than selling much less at a higher price. The problem is what the earlier poster posited - that those drugs don't stay in India, or patients travel to there, at which point the economics become much riskier. Given this site is full of people aware of how the VC process works they seem remarkably unable to apply the same logic to to drug development. Vast amounts of money are invested across many possible drugs, at each stage vicious winnowing occurs in order to receive later tranches of funding. In order to drive that winnowing there needs to be a payoff at the other end, and the payoff needs to be massive in order to justify the many other drugs looked into that don't pan out.