ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the pharmaceutical industry using the concepts of national innovation systems, where the pharmaceutical industry corresponds to a sector at a meso-economic level. The following sections present an economic characterization of this sector, the role of government as the new institutional framework and a characterization of technological capabilities of the pharmaceutical industry. It also presents the institutions that establish linkages with pharmaceutical firms and the knowledge flows that occur between them, together with a characterization of firms. Finally, this chapter concludes with a discussion of the factors that define the technological regime for the pharmaceutical sector, i.e. opportunity conditions, appropriability conditions, cumulativeness and knowledge base.
