David Iselin

Economic ideas you should forget

It is high time to forget some economic ideas that hinder progress in the field. Some examples include the assumption that GDP is the best way to measure economic progress, or the belief that economic growth will eventually improve the welfare of the population as a whole. This column discusses some of these ideas and argues that economics is a progressive science that is enriched by the ‘creative destruction’ of ideas.

Ask Your Doctor or Pharmacist! On the Effect of Self-Dispensing Physicians on Pharmaceutical Coverage

In most developed countries drugs are dispensed to patients through physicians and pharmacists. This paper studies the eects of allowing doctors to directly dispense drugs to patients (self-dispensation) on pharmaceutical coverage. We use a Swiss dataset in our empirical analysis because Switzerlands federalist legislation allows us to study self-dispensing and non-self-dispensing regimes alike. We add location information obtained from Google Geocoding services to our dataset in order to measure coverage based on distances. To capture a driver of long term positioning decisions, we take revenues as a proxy for a pharmacys usage rate. We nd that, ceteris paribus, self-dispensation leads to a lowered regional density of pharmacies. By matching similar pharmacies across both regimes we nd that revenues are substantially lower for pharmacies under a self-dispensation regime. Pharmacies in cantons that allow physicians to dispense drugs tend to have relatively higher revenues associated with non-drugs. We suggest to organize legislation on self-dispensation at a ne grained regional level as regional typologies are the most reasonable justication for regime choice.

Konjunkturanalyse: Prognose 2016/2017, Preissenkungen haben Einbruch abgefedert – Abwertung hellt Aussichten auf

This text contains the autumn forecast 2015 of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, released on 1 October 2015. The first part discusses recent economic developments abroad and in Switzerland, and presents the main forecast results across the various sectors of the economy. In the second part, detailed forecasts for Switzerland follow, split up into the main demand components of GDP. We expect the Swiss economy to grow by 0.9% in 2015, 1.4% in 2016 and 1.8% in 2017, respectively, representing a small upward revision compared with our last forecast from June 2015. In particular, the positive economic development in Europe and the depreciation of the Swiss franc during the second half of 2015 are specified as reasons for this adjustment. The negative price developments during the first half of 2015 are also newsworthy, as both the general price level and sales prices in certain sectors are falling.