Export of Pharmaceutical Products : An analysis of which factors that affects Sweden’s export of pharmaceutical products

Sammanfattning: The pharmaceutical industry is one of Sweden’s most important export industries with 6% of total exports. The purpose of this thesis is to analyse which factors affect Sweden’s ex-port of pharmaceutical products. Further, the different pharmaceutical products group Sweden exports will be identified. The modern trade theory, the monopolistic competition model, the product life cycle theory and the gravity equation are used to explain and to un-derstand the problem at hand. To analyse the problem, data of Swedish export of pharmaceutical products from 1997 to 2003 was used to the 176 destination countries Sweden exported to during the time period. The following factors were used as independent variables; distance, Gross Domestic Prod-uct (GDP) /capita, Area, Population, dummy variable for EU-membership, dummy vari-able for English or Scandinavian speaking countries, dummy variable for bordering to Sweden, dummy variable for same religion as Sweden and a dummy variable for countries that are not land-locked. The findings coincide with previous studies in the manner that distance and GDP/capita have a major impact on the sales abroad of pharmaceutical products. Also, countries with a larger population are importing more than countries with a smaller population. However, the strong affinities between the exporter and the importing countries found in previous studies were not found in the export of pharmaceutical products. Further, Sweden exports most of the product group that includes medicaments consisting of mixed or unmixed products for therapeutic or prophylactic uses.