Health Policy and High-Tech Industrial Development: Learning from Innovation in the Health Industry

Many countries and regions are actively promoting high technology industries as a means of stimulating the economy. The authors point out that these efforts are not only encouraging economic development, but they also reduce an economy's vulnerability to the negative consequences of world trade.

By weaving together the fields of health economics, industrial organisation and industrial development, this book describes the benefits of promoting a country's health industry as a way of stimulating its high-technology industrial capacity.

The authors illustrate that the development of a country's health industry not only improves the country's health status, but also promotes an industry with relatively stable, high-wage employment, creates the potential for exporting goods and services, and produces scientific spillovers that will favourably impact other high-technology industries.

Health Policy and High-Tech Industrial Development will be of great interest to health policy analysts by showing that health policies have broader implications than merely affecting health systems. Health economists should consider the advantages of viewing a country's health system not only as a unique industry that produces both health care and high-technology goods and services, but that also possesses the ability to stimulate development of a broader array of high-technology industries. Development and industrial economists and policymakers will also see the health sector from this different and innovative perspective.

Edited by Marco R. Di Tommaso, University of Bologna, Italy and Stuart O. Schweitzer, Professor of Health Policy and Management, Associate Director, Research Program on Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy, Fielding School of Public Health, University of California at Los Angeles, US