Incentivizing New Veterinary Pharmaceutical Products to Combat Antibiotic Resistance

The development of alternative animal health products is one way to reduce antibiotic use in agriculture. However, little economic research is directed at animal pharma. While programs to incentivize research and development (R&D) for human drugs have been adopted, analogous programs in veterinary pharma are only at the proposal stage. We describe the broad “push” and “pull” incentive mechanisms for human pharma, and analyze the differences in employing these in veterinary pharma. Using newly compiled data on veterinary drug approvals and firm‐level R&D, we also present data on trends in drug development for veterinary pharma.