International Reference Prices

Prices of medicines are mostly controlled, either through policies designed to hmit production and import costs, various measures regarding distribution margins or introduction of either international reference pricing, or national reference pricing criteria for reimbursement (Table 3). 

A simple step that could be initiated in Ghana for the further development of the pharmaceutical industry is to introduce tendering restricted to local manufacturers. This might be a two-stage tendering process a technical evaluation and then evaluation of the financial bid. At the first stage of technical evaluation, tenders may be accepted only from those local manufacturers that are GMP-compliant and that have the manufacturing capacities to satisfy the procurement requirements. The financial bid may be restricted to the companies which qualify in the technical evaluation. Based on the widely used International Reference Prices, maximum purchase prices may be also specified. This... 

The purpose of this chapter is to present the main economic characteristics of reference pricing (RP) as a system for the public funding of pharmaceuticals financed by the public sector. The following sections deal with the definition and objectives of RP and analyse the features of the various reference pricing systems that are applied internationally. This is followed by a look at the justification for RP from the economic point of view. We then go on to analyse the impact of RP policies, especially with regard to expenditure, consumption and drag prices. In the final section we discuss what can be expected from the application of RP to the Spanish health system. 

That argument was first famously raised by the then U.S. FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan before the First International Colloquium on Generic Medicine in Cancun, Mexico (September 25, 2003). It was raised again by the Republican Policy Committee of the United States Senate (2005). Its policy statement, Pharmaceutical Price Controls Abroad An Unfair Trade Policy, cited the 2002 U.S. Trade Promotion Authority Act, which acknowledged that price controls and reference pricing for pharmaceutical products (to be discussed below) are trade-distorting... 

The calibration of total protein, albumin, and specific protein methods remains a problem when analyzing samples from laboratory animals. Many of the available protein calibration materials are bovine or human in origin, and there are international reference proteins for some human proteins (Whicher 1984 Price and Newman 1997 Tiffany 1999). However, because calibration standards for laboratory animals are not widely available, the values between methods may show wide variations due to differences in calibrators. When some protein fractions are available for laboratory animals, these materials are often less than 95% pure. The investigator therefore... 

The prices listed in Table 5.3 represent SMM s factory gate selling prices for public procurement a comparison with the Management Science for Health international median reference prices for procurement is... 

In this section, unless otherwise stated, coal refers to the internationally traded commodity classified as coal ARA CIF AP 2, while gas refers to the high caloric gas (with a conversion factor 35,17 GJ/m3) from the Dutch Gas Union Trade Supply (GUTS). Moreover, prices for power, fuels and C02 refer to forward markets (i.e. year-ahead prices). 

For a so-called "advanced process of flash hydropyrolysis, (14), a paper by Rockwell International and Cities Service Research and Development reported a 1977 minimum high Btu gas price of 2.36/MMBtu from western subbituminous coal using "AGA/ERDA cost guidelines" with utility financing under conditions yielding significant quantities of by-product BTX liquids. For details, reference was made to contractual reports. 

The test procedure shall represent the real world operation of slow heat release appliances burning wood and take into account the transient parameters of a batch wise burning combustion process. It shall fulfill typical test laboratory requirements such as reproducibility of the results, laboratory independence, measuring accuracy and simple test procedures. The test procedure shall support the wood appliance industry for their high quality products and should have a good relation of price and performance. The test procedure shall refer as much as possible to existing international (ISO) and European (CEN, Austrian standards) test standards. 

The list referred to above must refer to the reimbursement levels, the common international name of the active ingredient, the dosage, the pharmaceutical form, the formulation and the price. 

Drug prices differ, somehmes very substanhally, between countries, even within the same economic area. Data on pharmaceutical prices can be compared both nationally and internationally. They serve both as a measure of the effect of different regulatory pohcies on the cost of pharmaceuticals, and as a reference for setting national drug prices. Here again however one has to be sure that the figures are reliable and that the comparisons made are valid. 

---