Shorenstein APARC director Gi-Wook Shin says that President Lee still has time to recover from the diplomatic missteps that have characterized his first months in office. He urges Lee to focus his U.S. policy on establishing a strong relationship with the incoming American president. Article in Korean.

The July/August issue of Health Affairs, the leading U.S.-based health policy journal, focuses on China and India. The special issue includes an article on China’s pharmaceutical policy by five contributors to Prescribing Cultures and Pharmaceutical Policy in the Asia-Pacific, a book forthcoming in 2009 from the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center series with Brookings Institution Press. Chapters on Korea and Japan by Soonman Kwon (Seoul National University) and Toshiaki Iizuka (Aoyama Gakuin University) also appear in Chinese translation in the journal Bijiao (Comparative Studies), along with an overview paper (“Pharmaceutical policy reforms to separate prescribing from dispensing in Japan and South Korea: Possible implications for China”) by Karen Eggleston, Asian Health Policy Program Director.

As Eggleston writes in the introduction to Prescribing Cultures, pharmaceuticals and their regulation play an increasingly important and often contentious role in the health care systems of the Asia Pacific.  For example, some economies such as China have extraordinarily high drug spending as a percentage of total health spending; India and a few others host thriving domestic pharmaceutical industries of global importance, while controversy surrounds patents, trade-related aspects of intellectual property (TRIPS), and pharmaceutical pricing within bilateral trade agreements (Australia-US, Republic of Korea-US); nations throughout the region struggle with appropriate regulation of drugs, from patents to evidence-based purchasing (e.g., Australia’s Pharmaceuticals Benefit Scheme) and direct-to-consumer advertising; deeply-rooted traditions of indigenous medicine are modernizing and integrating into broader health care systems; and policies to separate prescribing and dispensing re-write the professional roles of physicians and pharmacists, with modifications to accommodate cultural norms and strong economic interests. Effective prescribing and pharmaceutical use will be central to controlling infectious diseases, both old and emerging; protecting the global public good of antimicrobial effectiveness; and treating the growing burden of chronic disease in the Asia Pacific.

The forthcoming book will explore these issues in detail, through a multi-disciplinary lens. The first section of the book features chapters on pharmaceutical policy within seven selected health care systems of the Asia Pacific: South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Taiwan, Australia, India, and China. The second section focuses on the cross-cutting themes of prescribing cultures and access versus innovation. Taken as a whole, the contributions aim to provide an evidence base for policy while acknowledging the historical and cultural context that makes policies distinctive.

Clear evidence suggests the importance of health service provider payment incentives for achieving efficiency, equal access, and quality, including attention to primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. “Pay for performance” may be on the cusp of significant expansion in Asia, and reform away from fee-for-service has been underway for several years in several economies. Yet despite the policy relevance, the evidence base for evaluating payment reforms in Asia is still very limited.

China in particular has been undertaking significant reforms to its health care system in both rural and urban areas. With the expansion of insurance coverage and need to resolve incentive problems like “supporting medical care through drug sales,” there is an urgent need for evaluating alternative ways of paying health service providers. Evidence from policy reforms in specific regions of China, as well as other economies of the Asia-Pacific, can provide valuable evidence to help inform policy decisions about how to align provider incentives with policy goals of quality care at reasonable cost.

To illuminate these questions, the Asia Health Policy Program and several collaborating institutions are planning to convene a conference on health care provider payment incentives on November 7-8, 2008 in Beijing. The conference will highlight and seek to distill “best-practice” lessons from rigorous and policy-relevant evaluations of recent reforms in China and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific.

The organizing committee – including health economists from Shorenstein APARC, Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Seoul National University – reviewed submissions in June 2008 and accepted sixteen. The conference papers cover payment issues in Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Tajikistan, the Philippines, and the US, and the disciplines of economics, health services research/health policy, public health, medicine, and ethics. Topics include institutionalized informal payments; the impact of global budget policies on high-cost patients; public-private partnerships; public-sector physicians owning private pharmacies; evidence-informed case payment rates; payment and hospital quality; bonuses and physician satisfaction; physician prescription choice between brand-name and generic drugs; and differences in pharmaceutical utilization across insurance plans that pay providers differently (fee-for-service versus capitation).

Policymakers from China’s National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Health will also speak at the conference. Selected research papers will be published through the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center either in a special volume or in a special issue of an English-language health policy journal.

South East Asia Forum Director, Donald Emmerson discusses what impact, if any, there will b e on US-North Korean relations and ASEAN-North Korean relations once Pyongyang signs the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation at next week's Southeast Asian regional security meeting in Singapore.

While in London, Senior Research Scholar Rafiq Dossani spent time discussing the reasons behind India's continued rise and his recent book India Arriving: How This Economic Powerhouse is Redefining Global Business with CNBC's Europe Tonight host Guy Johnson.

While in London, Senior Research Scholar Rafiq Dossani spent time discussing the reasons behind India's continued rise and his recent book India Arriving: How This Economic Powerhouse is Redefining Global Business with CNBC's Europe Tonight host Guy Johnson. You can watch the interview here CNBC - Europe Tonight

 

"Taiwan has territorial rights, sovereign rights and jurisdiction over islands in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, as well as, developmental and managerial rights to important resources in these areas," says Dr. Yann-huei Song. "It will be difficult for the South China Sea and the East China Sea to become truly peaceful and cooperative maritime areas" if Taiwan were not included in talks about developing the resources of these areas. Dr. Song would like to correct the translation in the online English version of the article. He says the translation says that in "2002 Taiwan built a runway on Itu Aba Island of the Spratly Island group in the South China Sea. In fact, it was built at the end of 2007, and Taiwan's President Chen visited the island by C-130 military cargo plane on February 2, 2008."

Center's Associate Director for Research Daniel C. Sneider and former Pantech fellow Scott Snyder both criticize the agreement made with Kim Jong Il's government. "As always with North Korea, it's disappointing and frustrating" says Snyder.