Health sector market structure

The purpose of this book is to investigate public policy issues in pharmaceutical innovation. In Section II we first describe the important characteristics of prescription drugs. We emphasize that these characteristics deviate from the standard conditions in a competitive market. In Section III we discuss the current performance of the pharmaceutical market. In Section IV we investigate market failures that persist in allocating research and development (R D) resources and in the utilization of prescription drugs. In Section V we analyze the policy conflict between the economic and health sectors arising from pharmaceutical innovation. The final section discusses the structure of the book and the major content of the chapters. 

The purpose of this chapter has been to provide a broad, general overview of the role of the pharmaceutical industry in the economy and in the health sector, and to explore a number of problems arising from the industry s cost structure and from the traditional imbalance in the global markets for pharmaceutical products. 

Carotenoids are an important group of natural pigments with pronounced antioxidant activity, provitamin A factor, and many health benefits. The structure with conjugated double bonds governs mainly the proprieties of color, stability, detection, and quantification. With an increase of namral carotenoid markets, more different sources will be necessary and new technologies will be developed greener and cleaner, showing how promissory and profitable industrial sector can be. 

We argue that to achieve better developmental synergies between industrial development in manufacturing medicines and health system performance, both health and industrial sectors have to strengthen what we call collaborative capabilities the capability to respond effectively to the opportunities offered by the other sector. We identify key elements of these collaborative capabilities in each sector and trace some ways in which institutional evolution and changing market structures can move health and industrial supplier sectors towards or away from mutually beneficial trading and working relations with each other. 

A key determinant of a health sector s capacity to procure and use medicines and other medical supplies effectively, and to develop good local suppliers, is therefore its market structures. These determine how the population s demand for and need for medicines feeds through (or fails to feed through) into wholesale purchasing who are the resultant wholesale buyers of essential supplies what market power those buyers exercise and how they select and distribute supplies. 

Market structure advantage Conq)etition in the medical industry is much more intense in Southeast Asian countries than in western countries, where hospitals are state-owned and most of the health care sector is highly regulated. In Asia private hospitals are common and preferred by high-skilled doctors and nurses. Even public hospitals are competitive. Competition comes from medical centres run by entrepreneurial doctors. In Europe private hospitals are rare and mandatory medical insurance prevents competition between health institutions, leaving few ince n-tives for hospitals to provide additional nursing and related convenience services. 

These features are not unique to the lead mailret, but have affected all major non-ferrous metals to a varying extent. Indeed, they are symptomatic of technical developments in the metals industries themselves, as well as the transformation in economic activity and industrial structure that has taken place over the period. Thus, prices have been in general decline because of the combined effects of increasing production efficiency, which both cut costs and raised capacity, and slowing industrial demand, as the intensity of metal usage declined due to economisation and substitution. Lead has been more acutely affected because of the maturity of its markets, added environmental and health worries and probably, also, because of the laiger role played by the secondary sector. 

These national politics of the FME include autonomous nationbuilding faced with immense hurdles of technology transfer and the realpolitik of picking international partner nations. The crucial point is that the FME was an important industrial development First, as well as a Market first. It was the epitome of a nationally structured and regulated set of market environments across two phases (public and private sector industrial capabilities) aimed at building health successes. 

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