Broadening the definition of healthcare products in global trade: Insights from a new classification

Abstract

International trade in healthcare products took off during the 2000s, paralleling the peak of hyper-globalisation. Two decades later, the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of health security for governments. This crisis brought issues of industrial sovereignty to the forefront and exposed vulnerabilities within global production networks. However, the intricate web of global value chains has compromised the traceability of these essential goods. Additionally, the classification of healthcare products across multiple industries in standard trade and production nomenclatures complicates their identification and further obscures the analysis. In this paper, we systematically identify products that address the needs of national health systems and gather them into a single industry grouping to evaluate the scale and trends in trade. This healthcare industry grouping, encompassing a broad array of products—medicinal products and their compounds, medical technology equipment, and small medical materials— has demonstrated the highest relative growth among all industry groupings since 2000. Our study provides a detailed examination of the nature of global trade in the healthcare industry grouping and its five branches, categorized by production stage (intermediate and final) and quality/price range. We analyze the positioning of advanced economies in comparison to the rest of the world and offer insights into the geographical and geopolitical breakdowns of healthcare industry trade, both within and between country blocs.