The Industry of Pharmaceuticals between Competitive Development and Welfare

This paper would like to give a contribution to the discussion on which policies and rules should be adopted in order to relaunch the pharmaceutical sector in Italy. Due to its intrinsic features, social value and being one of the most regulated and strategic as based on innovation, this sector has higly specific economic and market peculiarities. Compatibility between the level of NHS expenditure for pharmaceutical provision, equity on medicines acces by the population without any kind of discrimination, level of profit for pharmaceutical companies to reinvest in research and development for new better drugs, is the main challenge for the progress of pharmaceutical. This work describes and analyses the economic features of the sector, its regulation and market dynamics, how medicines are classified, which are the processe from the start of the research to market maturity, role of patent, european authorization for a new drug to access the market, pricing and reimbursement process by National Health Authorities, measures adopted to contain and control NHS pharmaceutical expenditure. An overview of Pharmaceutical Industry will be carried out, discussing its microeconomy and the main issues, both globally and about the italian market, focusing on the peculiarity of the need of competitivity by innovation. In conclusion, some hypotesis of future scenarios and several economic and industrial actions to increase and develop the sector are proposed.