| By distinguishing the pharmaceutical industry (producing wealth) and the pharmaceutical business (capitalizing income), this dissertation explains why the increasing earning capacity in the global pharmaceutical business is paralleled with a decline in therapeutic innovation. It contends that increasing profits is found not in a surge of productivity but, instead, in the capacity by dominant pharmaceutical firms to increase their control over the medical knowledge structure. The knowledge-based economy, in the case of pharmaceuticals, should not be interpreted as an accumulation regime based on intellectual capital and permanent innovation but, instead, as an accumulation regime based on institutional transformations that bestow greater corporate power to dominant firms over the industry and the community in general. The capitalization of knowledge, that is the increasing differential earning-capacity for knowledge-based firms, is possible because of new institutional settings that were put in place to increase dominant firms' monopolistic power since the beginning of the 1980s. As such, the link binding knowledge, productivity and profitability is broken and we observe rather a link between the knowledge structure, power accumulation and profitability. |
