Regional Medical Device Security through Safety Standard Harmonization

Panit Wattanakoon () and Wanissa Suanin

No 79, Discussion Papers from Thammasat University, Faculty of Economics

Abstract: The 2019 global pandemic has served as a wake-up call for policymakers regarding the importance of prioritizing medical device security. As the virus spread, it was depleting supplies of key vital medical devices around the world. Many nations have then decided to impose export restrictions on certain pandemic-prevention-related medical devices. This paper argues that harmonization of regional safety standards could be another means for countries to promote regional medical device security. We examine how the EU Medical Device Regulation and ASEAN Medical Device Directive, regional efforts to harmonize safety standards, facilitates regional trade and contributes to the improvement of regional medical device security, using the gravity modeling framework. We find that EU version of safety standard harmonization promotes both regional and global trades, while ASEAN version can encourage only the regional, not the global one.

Keywords: Medical Device Trade; Safety Standard Harmonization; EU; ASEAN; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F14 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2023-10, Revised 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Econ TU Discussion Paper No.79, October 2023, pages 1-25

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econ.tu.ac.th/uploads/discussion_paper ... 128/bcfhprvxz346.pdf Revised version, 2023 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tha:wpaper:79

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Thammasat University, Faculty of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chompoo Thongchai ().