4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST existence of monopoly power in the hands of the large firms (all of them transnational) that dominate the industry, and can therefore provide a basis for an exploration of performance and policy issues. Geographical Concentration Data on the worldwide production and consumption of pharmaceutical products are difficult to find except for the advanced OEGD countries (with the exception of Switzerland, which does not publish such information). A large number of LDCs do not provide any data at all, and several of them which do, give unreliable or outdated estimates. Any calculation of worldwide figures has necessarily to be incomplete and based on guess work; however, since production is highly concentrated in countries that do provide reliable data, the overall magnitudes cannot be very misleading. The following figures, drawn from a variety of sources 2, show production and consumption of pharmaceuticals in 1973 for 48 market economy countries. The excluded countries are very small and very poor, so that their inclusion, if it were possible, would not affect the totals significantly. TABLE I ESTIMATED PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION OF PHARMACEUTICALS, 1973 (US $ millions) Area Number of Production Consumption^ Countries Value Percent Value Percent Developed (non-socialist) 17 24,919 84.4 23,372 80.8 South European6 4 1,534 5.2 1,789 6.2 Less developed (non-socialist)0 27 3,113 10.4 3,767 13.0 Total 48 29,566 100.0 28,937 100.0 SOURCE: S Lall, The Development of the Pharmaceutical Industry in Developing Countries, ID/204, UNIDO, Vienna, 1978. NOTES: a) Defined as production plus imports minus exports. b) Spain, Portugal, Greece"and Turkey. c) Including Yugoslavia. Table I indicates that the developed countries account for nearly 85 percent of the world production of drugs and for a somewhat smaller percentage of their consumption: the LDCs as a whole, while containing over three-fourths of the world's population, account for 10 percent of production and 13 percent of consumption. Estimates for growth rates are even less precise, but a comparison of 1973 figures with similar ones for 1971 suggests that output is growing, in current prices, at about 20 percent per annum for the world as a whole; at 18 percent for developed