Search

Health system expenditure on cancer drugs is rising rapidly in many countries given the high-priced novel treatments as well as the increasing usage due to a growing and ageing global population. The cost of cancer care continues to outstrip other diseases and it presents a global challenge to treatment access and cancer outcomes. Substantial variability exists in drug pricing across Asia, with low- or middle-income countries being heavily impacted. There is an urgent need to practice value-based pricing for oncology drugs. This will incentivize development of higher-value medicine and eliminate waste. Value-based assessments, financing infrastructure to assist appropriate prioritization, establishing domestic innovation and productive capabilities and reducing the unit economics of care are some of the measures that Asian countries should take towards ensuring universal health coverage for cancer care. Asia will need to keep driving cost management measures that are focused on drug pricing and simultaneously, should be encouraged to explore other interventions including centralising expertise for high "learning curve" efficiencies like chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cell therapy. There is a call for more international collaboration within Asia and a continuous need to engage the public within each country, in order to ensure equitable access to effective cancer medications.

This paper measures the impact of multi-market institutions, renewable energy consumption, and infrastructure on sustainable development in 76 selected countries over the period 2000-2015. To this end, we applied a dynamic Ordinary Least Square method with fixed effects, which has the advantage of further addressing cross-section heterogeneity in the sample. Our findings contribute two significant findings to the literature. First, we point to the importance of multi-market institutions in driving sustainable development. Second, we find that renewable energy, economic and social infrastructure can boost sustainable development, while financial infrastructure has a reverse effect. This finding is useful to target the most effective drivers for sustainable development., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestThe authors have no conflict of interest to declare., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.)