Deregulation on branded and generic drugs price and its effect: a study of Chinese pharmaceutical market

Abstract

Purpose

This research studies the effect of deregulation of price cap in pharmaceutical market. Price regulation (either through price cap or reference price) is common practice in the pharmaceutical market but recently there are increasing voices calling for deregulation claiming that deregulation could help in lowering drug price and increase revenue of pharmaceutical firms. Upon those callings, Chinese government removed the price cap regulation in June 2015. The author uses this natural policy experiment to study this effect.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, the author applied the interrupted time series analysis (ITSA) on the revenue data of nine categories of both generic and branded drugs in China from March 2011 to August 2016 (the time frame includes both before and after of the initialization of the deregulation) and analyzed the effect of deregulation.

Findings

The results showed that, whether the revenue of drugs will increase or decrease after the deregulation of price cap depends on the level of competition and the change of patterns of the branded and generic drugs are different. When HHI (Herfindahl–Hirschman index) is sufficiently low (competition is high), revenue does not change as a result of deregulation, when HHI is moderately low (moderate competition), revenue from generic drugs will decrease significantly and revenue from branded drugs will increase significantly, and when HHI is high (low competition), revenue from generic drugs will increase significantly and revenue from branded drugs will decrease significantly.

Originality/value

This is a unique study with a unique data set. Most previous studies focus on regulation of drug price and analyze how this may affect drug revenue; however, this is a natural policy experiment of de-regulation. Moreover, previously most studies focus on reference pricing regulation and this is price-cap, a different mechanism that is rarely studied. The originality/value is high of this article.

Citation

Liu, L. (2023), "Deregulation on branded and generic drugs price and its effect: a study of Chinese pharmaceutical market", International Journal of Health Governance, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 17-30. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHG-12-2021-0123