BACKGROUND In the decade after 1983, the annual growth rate of drug expenditure was about four times as high as that of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in Shanghai. In 1993 and 1994, a drug list policy and hospital revenue capping policy were introduced in Shanghai to contain drug expenditure. We studied the impact of these two policies, as a model for similar policies in other parts of...

Italian pharmaceutical policy has recently moved towards a "two lanes" approach, with regulation differing according to a drug's patent status. This study analyses the Italian regulatory framework, focusing on policies related to "off-patent" drugs. Three main regulatory innovations have been examined: (i) generics, introduced in Italy for the first time in 1996; (ii) the reference pricing (RP)...

The golden era of the pharmaceutical industry has brought the world many useful new medicines, a very powerful industry, and nice profits for shareholders. The global pharmaceutical market was worth USD 650bn in 2007, and has potential to grow, especially in middle-income countries. However, the free market mechanism that helped to shape the global pharmaceutical system now shows some distinct ...

Multinational companies in the life science sector are heavily influenced by government policies and regulations and in turn attempt to influence these actors nationally and internationally. This paper focuses on recent and on-going research, principally on the agrobiotechnology and, to a lesser extent, on the pharmaceutical industries, covering the evolution of policy and regulation in Europe,...

BACKGROUND To manage public expenditures in the mid-1990s, British Columbia implemented evidence-based drug coverage policies, including "reference pricing." Industry lobbied against the province's policy, arguing that reference pricing harms patients and that it is inconsistent with federal and provincial legislation. Researchers and the courts have studied and rejected industry's claims. Howe...

BACKGROUND Pharmaceutical communication is an essential component of pharmaceutical health care, optimally ensuring patients understand the proper administration and side effects of their medications. Communication can often be complicated by language and culture, but with pharmaceuticals, misunderstandings can prove particularly harmful. In Nunavut, to ensure the preservation and revitalizatio...

Australia has had a government subsidized universal system of pharmaceutical provision for 50 years. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) consumes around 14 percent of total government health care expenditures and has grown substantially in both range of drugs covered, and expenditure since it was first introduced in 1950. It incorporates patient copayments (with differentials for the gener...

Pharmaceutical products are indispensable for improving health outcomes. An extensive body of work on access to and use of medicines has resulted in an assortment of tools measuring various elements of pharmaceutical systems. Until now however, there has been little attempt to conceptualize a pharmaceutical system as an entity and define its strengthening in a way that allows for measuring syst...

The Japanese pharmaceutical industry has been growing steadily since the 1970's. The early success, however, largely depended on technological "diffusion" including technology transfer or licensing of competitive foreign pharmaceutical products followed by development of incremental drugs which largely contributed to the early prosperity of domestic industry. Recently, transformation in distrib...