ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Public Health Policy
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1512148
This article is part of the Research TopicHospital Management and Healthcare Policy: Financing, Resourcing and Accessibility, Volume IIView all 26 articles
Can the accepting foreign clinical data policy improve innovation investment of pharmaceutical firms? Empirical evidence from China
Provisionally accepted
- Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Shenyang, China
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In October 2017, China initiated adjustments to the registration procedures for imported drugs to promote accessibility to overseas drugs. In support of this decision, the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) issued a technical guideline regarding accepting foreign clinical trial data in July 2018. Collectively referred to as the accepting foreign clinical data policy, these measures have accelerated the influx of overseas drugs into China. In the face of the increasing import competition, there is no consensus as to whether this policy would stimulate or inhibit pharmaceutical firms' incentives to innovate. Therefore, using the panel data from 104 A-share pharmaceutical listed firms between 2013 and 2024, this study conducted a differencein-differences model to explore the impact of this policy on the innovation investment of Chinese pharmaceutical firms. The results demonstrate a significantly positive effect of this accepting foreign clinical data policy on pharmaceutical firms' innovation investment, which is verified with the parallel trend and robustness tests. Further analysis indicates that corporate absorptive capacity positively moderates the relationship between the policy implementation and innovation investment. In addition, the heterogeneity analysis suggests that this policy has a more significant effect on firms that are non-state-owned, engage in new drug research and have strong market power.This study serves as a significant supplement to the current literature regarding the accepting foreign clinical data policy and innovation investment, providing valuable insights for policymakers and R&D decision-makers in the pharmaceutical sector.
Keywords: Foreign clinical data, Innovation investment, Difference-in-differences, pharmaceutical firms, absorptive capacity
Received: 16 Oct 2024; Accepted: 11 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jiang, Su and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Wang Su, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Shenyang, China
Yuwen Chen, Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, Shenyang, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.