El Shinnawy, Azza
(2012)
Understanding the impact of protection on manufacturing efficiency levels and relative pharmaceutical prices evidence from Egypt’s generics pharmaceutical industry (1993-2008).
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This thesis aims at contributing to the literature on industrial policy by investigating patterns of 'association' between trade and industrial policies, the country’s national pharmaceutical policy (including pricing), the pre-January 2005 intellectual property rights
regime, productivity and productivity growth in the Egyptian generics pharmaceutical sector. This thesis presented evidence that positive total factor productivity (TFP) growth can be observed under the auspices of a protectionist regime, however, there is a need to revisit pharmaceutical regulatory protectionism, as it impacts negatively on export growth and on fair pharmaceutical prices. Under the auspices of what can be categorised as a protectionist regulatory regime, this thesis examined trends in TFP growth in 13 of Egypt's pharmaceutical generics firms, which account for 50 percent of the generics market by value. Empirical results indicated that the best-practice firm in terms of TFP change belonged to the private sector, while the laggard firm belonged to the state-owned public business sector. Empirical results indicated that mean TFP change for the sample firms throughout the study period 1993-2005 (1.01)
exceeded the mean TFP change for all Egyptian industries (0.75), and that there was evident disassociation or weak correlation -at best- between productivity growth and the
degree of export orientation. In light of both the absence of significant generics import competition in Egypt, it has been found that prices of generics were atypical in terms of exceeding standard worldwide generic-to-originator price ratios. Generic diffusion did not significantly bring down
average prices, while an evident wedge was observed between the market shares of the most sold generics versus the least-priced generics to the advantage of the former. As a result of enforcing pharmaceutical product patent protection as of January 2005, the price-related impact of the TRIPS Agreement in the domain of Egypt’s top 42 therapeutic
classes by market value (50 percent of the market), has been put in the range of LE 479 million.
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