Pharmaceutical Regulation and Incentives for Innovation in an International Perspective

Abstract

We examine pharmaceutical regulations and incentives for innovation from an international perspective, highlighting the public good nature of healthcare innovation and its cross-border diffusion. We summarize the empirical evidence on how push and pull incentives shape R&D investment, innovation, and global access. We emphasize the role of strategic interdependencies and spillovers, including free-riding in R&D financing, learning-by-doing effects, drug short- ages, reference pricing, and parallel trade. We then provide new evidence on the international spillovers of pull incentives on innovation, showing that international cooperation and innova- tive institutions are necessary to better align national regulations with the global objective of sustaining pharmaceutical innovation.

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Replaces

Pierre Dubois, “Pharmaceutical Regulation and Incentives for Innovation in an International Perspective”, TSE Working Paper, n. 25-1674, October 2025, revised December 2025.

Reference

Pierre Dubois, “Pharmaceutical Regulation and Incentives for Innovation in an International Perspective”, 2025, forthcoming.