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Pharmaceutical Industry

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Abstract

The pharmaceutical industry comprises firms which manufacture medicines, including vaccines. Many of these firms also perform some or all of the following functions: conducting basic scientific research to identify (patentable) chemical compounds with medicinal properties, developing those chemical compounds into safe, effective, and commercially viable medicines, gaining government approval to sell those medicines, and marketing those medicines to potential consumers and prescribers. This industry has been widely studied by those interested in the analysis of health care systems. However, I focus here on industrial organization research which seeks to explain general economic phenomena by using the pharmaceutical industry as a setting.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. http://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-1-349-95121-5

    Sara Fisher Ellison

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  1. Sara Fisher Ellison
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© 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

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Ellison, S.F. (2018). Pharmaceutical Industry. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2404

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