The common trope is that European price controls hinder innovation in pharmaceuticals [1]. I've read that American pharmaceutical firms spend 4x in R&D per capita than European counterparts.
Counterpoints?
Counterpoints?
But there is another factor which IMO is important: The domestic spend on pharmaceuticals. The US healthcare system seems to be more pharmaceutical friendly. Yearly US spend on pharmaceuticals alone is about $330 billion [2], while yearly EU spend on "medical goods", which I assume to include pharmaceuticals, seems to be only €120 billion [3].
So pharmaceutical spend per capita is also about 1:4 when compared to the EU, not just R&D.
As production usually follows consumption (which is why e.g. every US and EU car producer has domestic factories in China), one could also argue that the high US health care costs are the reason why so many US pharma companies exist.
[0] https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170307.05903...
[1] https://www.vfa.de/download/the-pharmaceutical-industry-in-g...
[2] https://www.actuary.org/content/prescription-drug-spending-u...
[3] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Factors that could reduce such spending without impacting research output include:
* Lower costs (e.g. salaries for early career researchers don't have to be as large to cover their university debt).
* More research done in publicly funded universities or other research institutions (including where a pharma firm funds a project).
* Better cooperation between companies (e.g. Research Council joint programmes).
* Better controls against overspending on dead-ends (cultural or legal).
* Different reporting on what, exactly, counts as "R&D" spending (e.g. does everything a researcher does at work count as Research? Does maintenance of research facilities count?)
I'm not saying that all of these represent the actual difference. I'm just saying that using spend in a given sector as a proxy for output seems a bit odd.