Pharmaceutical pricing policies in a global market

Pharmaceutical policy making raises particular challenges in reconciling key objectives for health policy, such as ensuring affordable access to the latest effective drugs, with other important policy considerations, such as providing support to a valuable national industry. Unusually among health policy issues, it also raises international considerations that further complicate decision making, particularly as the nature and extent of such considerations are not well understood. How do national pharmaceutical pricing policy decisions affect innovation in the pharmaceutical sector? How do such decisions affect prices paid for pharmaceuticals, or access to pharmaceuticals, in other countries?