Abstract

With aim of providing useful policy suggestion, it seems advisable to keep under consideration the assumptions underlying the Health Industry Model-HIM (Di Tommaso, Schweitzer 2000). This paper aims at providing useful information to gain an insight into a few typical behaviors of businesses in the Italian pharmaceutical market and how business strategies changed in the last two decades. In order to do so, it analyzes the situation of the Italian pharmaceutical sector taking into consideration 50 leading firms in terms of pharmaceutical sales. An initial analysis took into account three specific indicators to create two models, relative to the 80's and the 90's, respectively, which show the competitive strategy of the 50 businesses taken into consideration. In conclusion, it seems reasonable to state that the Italian market of the Nineties may represent a paradigmatic example, where substantial regulatory changes have caused the major firms - exposed on the research and innovation front - to face a critical situation to a much greater extent than smaller ones, ready to make the most of the same factors but in the form of licenses and, therefore, gaining flexibility with respect to the market challenges. Only the former contribute to Welfare from an HIM point of view, while the latter may at the most be consistent with an HM merely addressing a shrinkage in the public budget.