MRNA technology has proved in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic its breakthrough value as a basis for vaccines. There has been rapid development of highly safe, effective and robust mRNA vaccines, and these can be delivered at large scale. Yet the technology is the result of a long process of...

In the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have, among other measures, mandated the use of COVID certificates to prove vaccination, recovery or a recent negative test, and have required individuals to show certificates to access shops, restaurants, and education or workplaces. While arguments for and...

This study seeks to provide evidence for deciding whether or not a pharmaceutical innovation should be included in the benefit list of social health insurance. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted in Germany to measure preferences for modern insulin therapy. Of the 1,100 individuals...

In this paper, we address the issue of spurious correlation in the production of health in a systematic way. Spurious correlation entails the risk of linking health status to medical (and nonmedical) inputs when no links exist. This note first presents the bounds testing procedure as a method to...

Many politicians blame physician dispensing (PD) to increase health care expenditure and to undermine independence of drug prescription and income leading to a suboptimal medication. Therefore, PD is not allowed in most OECD countries. In Switzerland, PD is allowed in some regions depending on...

Today, the global pharmaceutical product value chain is becoming increasingly complex and this has led to the emergence of 'multiple quality standards' for medicines. But this non-uniformity in the quality of medicine is also contingent upon both the regulatory milieu in the country of...

With the ongoing trade normalisation process between India and Pakistan, opportunities to integrate have opened up between both countries. The pharmaceutical sector is crucial to health issues in developing economies and would be an ideal segment to focus on in improving trade relations between...