OREANDA-NEWS. September 20, 2013. At the joint session of the Headquarters for Joint Investigations of Violations of the Antimonopoly Law of the CIS Member-States and the Working Group on Pharmaceuticals, Deputy Head of the Department for Control over Social Sphere and Trade, Nadezhda Sharavskaya summed up the first results of an analysis of retail drug prices in the CIS, the EU and BRICS.

According to Nadezhda Sharavskaya, "analysis of drug prices in different countries is difficult because they are considerably influenced by several factors” including:

- Different systems of government regulation (tax, customs as well as regulation of drug circulation)

- Differences in government price regulation

- Different structure and level of income and expenses of the population

- In many countries producer prices for drugs on government sector are the result of arrangements between the payees (budgetary system, insurance funds, etc.) and the producers

- Discrepancies in the issues of drugs substitutability, different methods of prescribing drugs and the practice of shifting patients from one medicine to another

- In many countries there is a system of compensating drug costs in the form of discounts. Therefore prices can differ considerably depending on taking into account discounts in some countries and their absence in other countries

- Different lists of drugs circulating in various countries (in India, for instance, patented drugs practically do not circulate)

- Different dates of patent protection expiry

- Different volumes of consumption of particular drugs in different countries

- In the same country some drugs can be the most expensive in comparison with other countries, while others – the cheapest ones. Therefore, international practice is to compare the costs per day of treatment in different countries rather than direct price comparison.

Deputy Head of FAS Department pointed out that absence of information about the degree of influence of each of the above factors upon the price aggravated the difficulties of price comparison.

“The prospective goal of the conducted and similar studies "is to form “fair prices” on the national markets both within the procurement system and in retail. Thus, its is necessary to determine market comparability conditions and devise a technique to determine benchmark prices for the CIS countries as well as maximum allowable deviation, and reveal prices that fall outside the allowable deviation in order to undertake measures to reduce them”, said Nadezhda Sharavskaya.