President Scaccabarozzi calls for a "three-year stability pact for the sector" and that "the rules do not change every 2 months". In the third stage of "Production of value" the growth of the sector was also underlined. However, there are negative signals: employment and investments are declining.
22 JUN – "Our recipe is simple and at no cost: we don't want, we don't ask for concessions or incentives, but a three-year stability pact and clear rules that don't change every two months". This is the request from Massimo Scaccabarozzi, president of Farmindustria, in Parma to participate in the third stage of "Production of value" hosted by Chiesi of Parma. Scaccabarozzi underlined the constant growth of a sector "that produces health", also strong abroad: "We export the 67% of what we produce".
The meeting revealed that pharmaceuticals is the sector in Italy with the highest propensity for Research and Innovation: it invests 1.2 billion euros every year in Research and Development, or 12% of the total investments of the manufacturing and it is the sector with the highest share of companies carrying out innovative activities (81%), a figure for which Italy is second in Europe only to Germany.
Innovation, however, it has been recalled, comes from a long and costly process. To put a new medicine on the market, 10-15 years of studies and research are needed, over 1 billion euros of investments, but only one substance out of every 10,000 arrives on the market and only 2 out of 10 drugs amortise the costs. The pharmaceutical sector turned out to be healthy but there are also negative signals: the trend in employment, which has fallen by 11,500 thousand workers since 2006 and clinical trials, which have decreased in Italy by 23% in 3 years, more than in other large European countries show the need for urgent choices to make the country system more attractive. And negative signals also come from investments, which decreased in 2012 for the first time in ten years; the times for access to innovation which are long; from PA payments on average of almost 250 days, with peaks of over 600, for a total credit claimed by businesses of 4 billion.
