Trade Policies in Medical Goods and Services
Figure 2.7 Government support measures for the medical goods sector predated the pandemic
Number of interventions
700
16
600
59
500
5
400
13 42
300 200 100 0
45 68
5 34 86
2009
2010
6 36
3 49
4 37
1 42
98
106
145
152
2011
2012
2013
2014
305
2015
58 8 3 40
14 10
107
193
195
212
2016
2017
2018
545 8 10
389
156 2019
2020
2021
Localization measures (except public procurement localization) Public procurement measures (including public procurement localization) Inward subsidies
Source: Global Trade Alert (GTA) database, https://www.globaltradealert.org/data_extraction. Note: The government support measures represent a total of 156 economies (across all income groups) tracked by GTA data between 2009 and 2021.
provide information on the impact of measures) found to favor local firms in the medical goods sector (figure 2.7). A total of 3,305 instances of such government support measures have been recorded in a total of 156 economies from 2009 through 2021, all of which have been implemented. Of that total, 2,650 are subsidies to commercial medical goods operators. In addition, 569 changes to public procurement regulations or laws favor local suppliers of medical goods. As figure 2.7 also shows, the number of government support measures was rising in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. Then more than 600 instances of government support measures using these three policy instruments were recorded in 2020. The number of subsidies awarded to producers of medical goods has been on the rise since the 2008–09 Global Financial Crisis. The three-year moving average rises from 84 for the years 2009–11 to 265 in the three years before the pandemic (2017–19) and rises further to 350 (for the years 2020–21). To put this fourfold increase in perspective, consider the following: over the same period (2009–21), the total number of subsidies in all sectors recorded each year in the GTA database rose by just under 150 percent. The faster growth in recorded subsidies to the medical sector is not a pandemic-era phenomenon; annual subsidy awards rose by 71 percent across all sectors of the economy before the pandemic, whereas they more than tripled in the medical sector.
Government procurement The introduction of competitive and transparent government procurement procedures holds the potential to contribute substantially to improving the accessibility and
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