TY  - JOUR
AU  - Timur,Aysegul
AU  - Picone,Gabriel
AU  - DeSimone,Jeffrey S.
TI  - Has the European Union Achieved a Single Pharmaceutical Market?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 16261
PY  - 2010
Y2  - August 2010
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16261
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16261.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Aysegul Timur
Johnson School of Business, Hodges University
2655 Northbrooke Drive
Naples, FL 34119
E-Mail: atimur@hodges.edu

Gabriel Picone
Dept. of Economics
University of South Florida
4202 E. Fowler Ave.
Tampa, FL 33620
E-Mail: gpicone@coba.usf.edu

Jeffrey S. DeSimone
Department of Economics
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
E-Mail: desimone@umd.edu
AB  - This paper explores price differences in the European Union (EU) pharmaceutical market, the EU's fifth largest industry.  With the aim of enhancing quality of life along with industry competitiveness and R&D capability, many EU directives have been adopted to achieve a single EU-wide pharmaceutical market.  Using annual 1994–2003 data on prices of molecules that treat cardiovascular disease, we examine whether drug price dispersion has indeed decreased across five EU countries.  Hedonic regressions show that over time, cross-country price differences between Germany and three of the four other EU sample countries, France, Italy and Spain, have declined, with relative prices in all three as well as the fourth country, UK, rising during the period.  We interpret this as evidence that the EU has come closer to achieving a single pharmaceutical market in response to increasing European Commission coordination efforts.
ER  -