3.8 percent of drugs sampled from countries with emerging economies failed basic quality control tests--and these drugs are used to treat potentially lethal infections. Africa has a greater problem with substandard products than any other location.

One of the unwritten, unspoken and rarely thought-about assumptions of those buying medicines is that they will work. We take it for granted that the medicines we buy will work as the scientists who developed the product intended.

In his new book, “Phake: The Deadly World of Falsified and Substandard Medicines,” Roger Bate explores the underground trade in illegal medicines that kills over 100,000 people per year and supplants billions of dollars of real products.

A comprehensive study of drug samples in African and Asian countries--assessed for variability by spectrometer--suggests that registered products perform notably better than unregistered products.

If there is one thing we learned from the 2008-2009 global economic recession, it is how much more interconnected the global economy has become and how difficult it is for emerging market economies to decouple from industrialized economies.

Whereas public debt levels in many major industrialized countries will soon exceed 100 percent of GDP, those in the major emerging market economies generally range from 40 to 50 percent of GDP.

This study attempts to ascertain whether registered medicines perform better in simple quality tests than those that are either not registered or not known to be registered.

Evidence from numerous studies shows that emerging markets have far more poor quality drugs than western markets. There are many reasons for this, but one reason, investigated in this paper, is the possibility that smaller, often privately-owned, pharmacies take greater risks with drug procurement than larger organizations, which are often franchises or major pharmacy chains.