The turnover of the companies in North Savo in 2011 was nearly 10 billion euros, of which industry accounted for just under a third. The industrial structure of the region is not strong, but on the other hand it is not alarmingly thin either, because it does have certain successful niches. North...

A recurrent challenge in applied ethics concerns the development of principles that are both suitably general to cover various cases and sufficiently exact to guide behavior in particular instances. In business ethics, two central approaches—stockholder and stakeholder—often fail by one or...

The College Voor Zorgverzekeringen (CVZ) provides guidance to the Dutch healthcare system on funding and use of new pharmaceutical technologies. This study examined the impact of evidence, process and context factors on CVZ decisions in 2004–2009. A data set of CVZ decisions pertaining to...

Early in the history of life, algae changed the planet’s atmosphere by producing oxygen, thus paving the way for the evolution of eukaryotic organisms. In an era in which the consumption of fossil fuels is a prime topic of concern, few people realize that the oil we currently exploit comes...

This paper examines how equitable, differentiated pricing can improve access to and affordability of medicines, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and how governments and supranational agencies can create an environment that enables pharmaceutical companies to operate a...

During the past 20 years, the world pharmaceutical industry has experienced a dramatic increase in R&D intensity. We apply and extend a model developed by Grabowski and Vernon (2000) with a pooled data sample of the 15 publicly listed Japanese drug firms for the period 1987 to 1998. As in the...

Assessing the value of new medical technologies may require new approaches that take into account a more comprehensive set of parameters than the incremental cost/QALY. It is argued that MCDA can fulfil this role and has the potential to be methodologically superior to the currently used...