ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Health Economics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1587028
This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Value-Based Medicine: Lessons from China's Healthcare EvolutionView all 8 articles
Can the Marketing Authorisation Holder System Improve the ESG Performance of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers?
Provisionally accepted
- Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China
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The Marketing Authorisation Holder (MAH) system is an advanced drug registration mechanism widely adopted globally Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of in-depth empirical investigations concerning MAH within the context of pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprises. This research endeavors to investigate the influence of MAH on the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) performance of companies through the application of the differencein-differences model, leveraging firm data from China's A-share-listed pharmaceutical manufacturing sector spanning from 2012 to 2019. Our findings reveal three key insights. First, MAH markedly enhances the ESG performance of pharmaceutical manufacturing entities. Secondly, MAH impacts firms' ESG performance via three pathways, namely, boosting research and development (R & D) investment, diminishing the internal pay disparity, and lowering supply chain concentration. Thirdly, the effect of MAH on firms' ESG performance is more pronounced in nonstate-owned firms, those with elevated management shareholding, and firms with enhanced internal control levels. Furthermore, this study ascertained that MAH exerted no influence on firm ESG variance and real earnings management. The results offer actionable policy recommendations for refining the MAH system and promoting the sustainable development of pharmaceutical manufacturing firms.
Keywords: Marketing Authorisation Holder system, ESG performance, R & D investment, internal pay gap, Supply chain concentration
Received: 03 Mar 2025; Accepted: 26 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li. 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: Jiajing Li, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China
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