In Spain, the social security (i.e., the public health system) budget relays on the local administrations of every region. From this budget, a very important amount of money goes to finance, totally or partially and medicines for people. If the administrations do not take this issue seriously,...

Globalization, far from eliminating the relevance of geography, brings to the surface the importance of location as a collector and repository of specialized knowledge. In this “new age of capitalism”, regions are emerging as important catalysts for innovation and production development....

We study the choice of drug for the treatment of high blood pressure (hypertension) in Sweden between 1988-1994. During this time period calcium antagonists and ACE-inhibitors increased their market shares at the expense of the older drugs diuretics and beta-blockers. We use a prescription micro...

We study effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in a mar- ket with two pharmaceutical firms providing horizontally dierentiated (branded) drugs. Patients varying in their susceptability to medication are a prioriuninformed of available medication. Physicians making the prescription...

A note on the long-awaited Draft National Pharmaceutical Policy 2006. The Policy appears to have taken into consideration consumer needs, paying respect to rational therapeutics. A closer examination of the details---which is what policy critique should do—shows a patchy effort that may...

The Committee’s present examination of ‘Availability and Price Management of Drugs and Pharmaceuticals’ is with the objective of making available quality medicines at affordable prices to the masses. The Committee desire that their recommendations are considered in the...