Review of the Office of Fair Trading’s market study of the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme
The OFT Report on the PPRS is 114 pages long and, collectively, the annexes add up to 924 pages. As might be expected of a text of this length, it contains a large number of different strands of argument/reasoning and covers a wide range of issues. Almost inevitably, there are inconsistencies in places, and, more avoidably (but also a very common tendency in this type of document), there are many points at which the reasoning drifts off into economic theorising that is only loosely related to the principal issues and evidence at hand.
For obvious reasons it is impossible in a review such as this to assess each and all of the elements of the Report, and some selection mechanism or filter must be applied to the material. The most straightforward way to deal with this issue is to focus upon those aspects of the analysis which the OFT itself considers to be the most significant, as indicated/revealed by what is said in the main text of the Report.
