PARALLEL IMPORTS, INNOVATIONS AND NATIONAL WELFARE: THE ROLE OF THE SIZES OF INCOME CLASSES AND NATIONAL MARKETS FOR HEALTH CARE

Rajat Acharyya and Maria Garcia-Alonso

The Singapore Economic Review (SER), 2008, vol. 53, issue 01, 57-79

Abstract: This paper shows that regardless of any intra-country income differences, parallel imports result in a lower level of health-care innovation but, contrary to popular as well as conventional theoretical wisdom, alower pricein the Third World compared to market-based discrimination. Despite such a lower price, however, parallel imports unambiguously make all buyers in the Third World worse off when intra-country income disparity exists. On the other hand, even discarding the MNC's profit, there will be cases in which the richer country prefers price discrimination as well. That is, in those cases, no countries will have any incentive under the welfare criterion to undo price discrimination, contrary to Richardson (2002).

Keywords: Parallel imports; price discrimination; health-care innovation; market size; income distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1142/S0217590808002847

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