The Pharmaceutical Trade War with Europe Did Not Begin Recently
NATIONAL REVIEW
America invents the majority of the world’s new medicines — yet we ran a $117 billion global trade deficit in biopharmaceutical products last year. If one excludes U.S. firms in Ireland, the trade deficit is still large. Foreign price controls are a major reason that America imports so much more than it exports, despite dominating the sector when it comes to research and development. Fighting this foreign free riding is critically important — but not all methods are equally effective, and some reforms under consideration may even be counterproductive.