ABSTRACT
A microeconomic study on the industry is aimed at verifying the findings of the two macroeconomic studies. One, the pharmaceutical industry is highly competitive, to a degree in excess of perfect competition. Two, mergers and acquisitions have had no effect on the industry's overall concentration with those firms involved in mergers and acquisitions experiencing no disproportionate increases or decreases in their market share relative to their non-merging rivals. Time limitations and practical restrictions lead to sample sizes of forty-four and forty-three therapeutic submarkets being selected for the analyses of rivalry in the private and public sector. The transitory nature of the markets at the firm level is echoed by the concentrations of the submarkets at the product level. The increase of oligopolistic markets in the public sector is also reflected by the categorization of submarkets according to their number of products.
