Posts Tagged: "Philippines"

The Philippines has so far relied on donations and direct purchase to obtain vaccines to address the pandemic. As of March 2021, the Philippines received 2 million Sinovac doses from China and about half a million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines from the COVAX facility. However, these doses could only vaccinate 1% of the country’s more than 110 million people. Concerns regarding access to COVID-19 vaccines are also looming in other developing and least developed countries. It is reported that due to a supposed vaccine hoarding by wealthy countries, low-income countries have minute chances of getting their populations vaccinated against COVID-19 in the coming year. On the contrary, wealthier nations have already been able to secure nearly three times the doses needed to vaccinate their entire populations. As the United Nations Secretary General lamented back in February, progress in COVID-19 vaccinations has been “wildly uneven and unfair.”

Typically, there are three categories of costs involved in filing trademark applications in Southeast Asia and, subsequently, getting them registered; these are official fees, attorney charges, and translation costs. As is the case with the other types of trademark costs, the costs are generally dependent on the number of classes of goods and services under which the trademark applications are filed. The ‘International Classification of Goods and Services’ contains 34 classes for goods and 11 classes for services.

Founded in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regional organization that aims to “accelerate economic growth, social progress, and sociocultural evolution among its members.” The organization’s membership has subsequently expanded to ten, with the induction of Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. Collectively, the ten economies constitute an economic powerhouse; the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) was the third largest Asian economy and the seventh largest global economy in 2014, as per the ASEAN website. Further, the AEC is expected to grow at a feverish pace of 7% per annum and is touted to be the fourth largest economy in the world by 2030 (Ken Moriyasu; 2016).