The Chinese pharmaceutical market is currently the second largest in the world, behind only the United States. Current challenges within the Chinese pharmaceutical sector include poor drug quality, weak protection of intellectual property, high levels of inappropriate prescribing, delayed access to innovative medicines and high out-of-pocket payments.
As China continues to face fiscal challenges from an aging population and increases in non- communicable diseases, promoting efficiency within the pharmaceutical sector will become increasingly important. With the overall aim of establishing an overarching national pharmaceutical framework to help guide policy reform this report has 3-key objectives:
1) To undertake a mapping of the key trends and policy directions in China’s health and pharmaceutical policy and benchmark these with similar trends from an international perspective;
2) To identify and propose several validated policy areas in China’s health and pharmaceutical policy environment that merit in-depth research and analysis; and
3) To combine the above two objectives by highlighting the key international policy trends from which China could benefit