June 18, 2012 – 6:58 pm
(ASCA) - Rome, June 18 - The Italian pharmaceutical industry, "the drug giant" (318 companies in the country, a production value of over 25 billion in 2011 and 65,000 direct employees and almost as many in related industries), is in difficulty after the continuous cuts in public spending in Italy. For a sector that sees five regions dominate in terms of employment weight (Lombardy in the lead, followed by Lazio, Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna and Veneto) the barometer for the first four months of 2012 in fact marks bad weather after a 2011 already in a stagnant phase.
The alarm comes from the Report24/Enterprise "Pharmaceutical Industry" to be published tomorrow in the Sole 24 Ore in the Impresa&Territori section.
Production fell by 6.2 percent to one third of the year compared to the same period in 2011, a sign that the internal market is slowing down and that not even exports (the lung that has given oxygen to the sector in recent years, with a weight on turnover that is worth 61 percent) can no longer compensate. The situation is difficult for the sector also because national policies have produced cuts after cuts in recent years. Repeated maneuvers, which in five years have unloaded reductions of 11 billion in various ways on the sector which is now preparing to face a further pruning by one billion, in application of last year's maneuver, but also in the wake of the spending review that the government is preparing.
However, the sector suffers from other critical factors. Like the typicality of the Italian political system and, consequently, of the regulatory one, the result of the choices - and of the non-choices - of politics and of the governments of circumstance. Few data: the biblical times for access to new drugs, which reach 500 days. Or the delays in payment by the health service: 251 days on average, but with peaks reaching 740 in Calabria.
What strategies to adopt? In the analysis by Stefano da Empoli, President of the Institute for Competitiveness, in the Report24/Enterprise on the pharmaceutical industry, here are three minimal but immediately feasible proposals. ”If the further planned cuts (which add up to a drop of more than 25% over the last decade) cannot be cancelled, they could at least be contained, operating on an overall remodulation of the current spending ceilings.
Furthermore, access to innovative medicines should be improved, bringing it at least in line with the European average, to the benefit of patients and not just businesses, and average payment times should be reduced, which risk choking a sector which pays public administrations for the domestic market.
Without this minimum package of measures and a more stable framework of rules than in the past, there is a serious risk that historians rather than economists will be involved in pharmaceuticals in our country in the coming years".
And the president of Farmindustria, Massimo Scaccabarozzi, for his part raises an alarm on the repercussions of the current situation on foreign investors: "They see Italy as a country that does not give access, which has lower prices and spending ceilings per product, which asks for shelves, which changes the rules
