Laspeyres price indexes

An accurate measure of the apparent causes of the evolution of pharmaceutical expenditure could be obtained by taking chain-linked Laspeyres price indexes for each therapeutic group with a suitable level of disaggregation. In this situation, ideally we would have monetary measures of willing-... 

Method The authors use information on all non-hospital sales of pharmaceutical products in 1992 in a sample of countries consisting of the USA, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and the UK. The database was provided by Intercontinental Medical Systems (IMS). The empirical analysis is based on the calculation of the Paasche and Laspeyres price indexes and the ratio between them. The descriptive analysis is completed with the econometric analysis (quasi-hedonic model) of the determining factors of the variation in the relative prices of each active ingredient in each country taking the USA as the point of comparison. 

The analysis of the contribution made by increased pharmaceutical spending to the growth in the per capita intensity of health resources suffers from major measurement problems that deprive available indicators of any value. Traditional pharmaceutical price indexes (such as the Laspeyres index, used to calculate the pharmaceutical component of the consumer price index) provide little relevant information in a market in which the introduction of therapeutic innovations is of prime importance the indexes show an apparent freeze, and sometimes even a steep drop (as in the Spanish case). However, the steady rise in the average price per prescription paints a very different picture. 

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See also in sourсe #XX -- [ , ]

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