In December 2020, Germany implemented a policy restricting online pharmacies from offering rebates on prescription drugs to members of the statutory health insurance. This policy change created a natural experiment, allowing us to analyze its impact on the pharmaceutical market using...

I study the passthrough of regulated ad valorem pharmacy markups and reduced Value Added Tax (VAT) rates to pharmaceutical retail prices in Finland. My reduced form evidence shows that pharmaceutical manufacturers respond to a decrease in regulated pharmacy markups by increasing their wholesale...

The 340B Drug Pricing Program was instituted to bolster the health care safety net without relying on taxpayer money. It allows participating health care facilities - most of which are hospitals - to purchase drugs filled at in-house or contracted external pharmacies at discounts from...

This paper examines the optimal content regulation of DTCA by comparing two forms of DTCA-product-specific and category-specific-and identifies a key tradeoff which underlies this policy debate. Our analysis suggests that the optimal form of DTCA depends crucially on the cost effectiveness of...

Over the past decades, US Congress enabled the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to facilitate and expedite drug development for serious conditions filling unmet medical needs with five special designations and review pathways: orphan, fast track, accelerated approval, priority review, and...

Introduction: In August 2019 an unexpected presidential election result caused a change in expected exchange and inflation rates. The objective of this study is to analyze the relation between market share and the decision of increasing prices in the pharmaceutical industry in Argentina.Methods:...

Background Introducing more generics has been a successful strategy for lowering pharmaceutical prices and expenditure. However, the effect of the strategy depends on the pricing schemes for generics. We aimed to update the South Korean generic markets in terms of effective competition, and to...

This article reassesses the book Africa and the War on Drugs (2012) and a related special journal issue (2016) in the light of drug market and policy developments since 2012. As part of this reassessment, we question some of the assumptions made in the book and special issue. More specifically,...

Markets require informed participants to function efficiently. This paper examines the impact of providing targeted information directly to patients on their purchasing-decisions regarding pharmaceutical drugs. We analyze the effect of informational letters sent by a Swiss health insurer to...

Health care markets often lack a market force because the presence of health insurance undermines price signals. Patients have little incentive to shop for low-priced alternatives because they do not bear the full cost of their health care consumption. In turn, producers lack incentives to...

Real-world data (RWD) are an increasingly important input into the pharmaceutical R&D process as shown by countries like the USA or Finland. As the availability of and access to Swiss RWD is rather limited, the question arises whether this creates a burden for pharmaceutical R&D in Switzerland....

The article focused on customer loyalty and examined the factors that influence end-users' loyalty and attitudes towards domestic manufacturers. Factors such as price, quality, place, promotion, satisfaction, awareness, and trust were chosen to measure customer loyalty towards domestic...

This report on the Availability and Pricing of Essential Medicines in Myanmar relies on multiple assessments (2021 - 2023) conducted jointly by the World Bank and World Health Organization as well as other publicly available information. This report provides an overview of findings from a...

The literature on the Indian pharmaceutical industry has examined the importance of product patents and the attempts policy has made to regulate them. However, it has not done the same for the question of brands. Our study addresses this gap. The Tariff Commission Report of 1968, a turning point...

The purpose of this report is to analyze the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the vaccine industry from an international perspective. The objective is to learn from the experience and contribute to the design of better tools for future vaccine development and manufacturing, as we...

This paper analyzes the debate over the international dissemination of data exclusivity as a form of protection for clinical trial data. This is a critical demand for pharmaceutical companies seeking larger market shares and longer periods of monopoly in order to recover investments in research...

Introduction: In August 2019 an unexpected presidential election result caused a change in expected exchange and inflation rates. The objective of this study is to analyze the relation between market share and the decision of increasing prices in the pharmaceutical industry in Argentina.Methods:...

Background Medicine pricing in the community pharmacy sector in Zimbabwe significantly influences accessibility to health care. In this pilot survey, we investigated how community pharmacies in Zimbabwe apply various mark-up strategies to essential and non-essential medicines, and gathered...

As the United States heralds the onset of the Biden administration, health policy issues have been receiving national attention, from the drive to vaccinate all Americans by the summer to ongoing questions about the fate of the Affordable Care Act before the Supreme Court.1 However, there is...

Insurers subcontract with pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) to administer drug insurance. PBMs typically profit from the difference between a fixed amount and the reimbursement paid to pharmacies (i.e., "spread pricing"). Some states require insurers and PBMs to use cost-plus contracts, in which...

The World Health Organization (WHO), with the scientific support of the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP), guides the development of medicines for market authorization using biowaiver strategies based on the Biopharmaceutical Classification System (BCS). A review of the regulatory...

In recent years, pharmaceutical drug traceability systems have been developed as critical tools for improving the digital supply chain's transparency and visibility. Blockchain-based drug traceability proposes a promising solution to create a distributed shared data platform for an irreversible,...

This short paper identifies an insidious pattern in the United States (US) pharmaceutical industry: while drug prices are skyrocketing, insurers are perfectly shielding patients from higher costs at the pharmacy checkout, letting patients live in a "bubble" of price insulation. As drug prices...