Contemporary Trends in the Development of the Pharmaceutical Industry in the World

The pharmaceutical industry remains today a prominent high-technology sector of the economy,and consistently maintains its competitiveness on the world market at a very high level. Similarly to aircraft and spacecraft manufacturing and the electro-energy industry, pharmaceutical industry belongs to a group of innovative high-technology industries, which are based on scientific research results processed for industrial activities. The purpose of this study is to present and analyse global trends currently observed in the pharmaceutical industry in the world. In an era of increasing globalization, new prime movers of the development of the pharmaceutical industry are the countries from peripheralregions, mainly members of the BRICS group. For this reason, this article focuses on the emerging Asian and Latin American markets, next to the United States and countries of Western Europe. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Brazil and China deemed the stimulation of the pharmaceutical industry one of the prime determinants of their future economic development. The following paper at first presents characteristics of the pharmaceutical industry products: innovative and generic medicines, medications available without prescription, biological agents, biosimilars and pharmaceutical substrates. Furthermore, the author specifies the properties and rates the dynamics of changes that are taking place in the global pharmaceutical market, while explaining the specifics of the relocation of the pharmaceutical industry. By comparing the number of publications in the field of pharmacy in selected countries of the world, the author confirmed the increasing importance of this industry on the global economy. In the last part of the article, the author presents the structure, number and distribution of clinical trials on a global scale. To illustrate the trends currently taking place in the development of the pharmaceutical industry, the author used raw statistical data in the field of pharmacology and literature on the subject.