Globalization and the pharmaceutical industry revisited.

This survey of the pharmaceutical industry at the beginning of the 21st century updates some of the information provided in Claudio Tarabusi and Graham Vickery's survey, "Globalization in the Pharmaceutical Industry," published in the International Journal of Health Services in 1998, which was largely based on data up to 1993. However, the purpose of the present article differs from that of Tarabusi and Vickery, which covered a wide range of aspects of the industry relevant to globalization but did not explicitly address the question of the extent to which the industry could be described as globalized. After looking at the industry in some detail, the author directly confronts the question of the appropriateness of the use of the term "globalization" for characterizing the directions in which the pharmaceutical industry has been moving.