Financing Pharmaceutical Innovation: How Much Should Poor Countries Contribute?

William Jack and Jean Lanjouw

No 28, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: We use a public economics framework to consider how pharmaceuticals should be priced when at least some of the R&D incentive comes from sales revenues. We employ familiar techniques of public finance to relax some of the restrictions implied in the standard use of Ramsey pricing. In the more general model, poor countries should not necessarily cover even their own marginal costs, and the pricing structure is not related to that which would be chosen by a monopolist in a simple way. We use this framework to examine on-going debates regarding the international patent system as embodied in the WTO’s TRIPS agreement.

Keywords: pharmaceutical; poor countries; pricing structure; patent system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D40 D42 D63 I12 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2003-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ino
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/2762

Related works:
Journal Article: Financing Pharmaceutical Innovation: How Much Should Poor Countries Contribute? (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:28

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