The Role of the Health Care Sector in Expanding Economic Opportunity

Abstract

Multinational health care companies can play critical roles not only in improving access to medicines and quality care for citizens of developing countries, but also in expanding economic opportunities in those countries. While the health care industry broadly defined includes a wide range of businesses, for the purposes of this paper, we have focused on the pharmaceutical industry and the ways it can participate in expanding economic opportunity in developing countries. Compared to many other industries, the pharmaceutical industry is unique in the ways it creates economic opportunity. First, because many parts of the pharmaceutical value chain require only a small number of well-educated workers, the industry is typically not well positioned to directly provide large-scale employment in developing countries. In addition, the markets that multinational pharmaceutical companies target for their products are fairly limited in developing countries, and this restricts the scale of employment in those markets. Finally, the core competencies of pharma companies lie in expanding access to medicine and health care. The majority of their efforts in the developing world focus on these issues through activities such as drug donation and patient assistance programs. While these programs may not always lead directly to expanded economic opportunity, they help lay the foundation for it by improving public health, an essential enabling condition for individual productivity and overall economic development.