Latvian per capita pharma spending to fall below $168 in 2011, says BMI

While the Latvian ruling coalition approved an additional allocation of 26.2 million lats ($46.65 million) for the health care sector, as a result of intense public pressure, this was widely regarded as a pre-election move, notes a new report from Business Monitor International.

However, the 2010 budget had previously been cut by 70 million lats ($127 million), with the emergency funding thus not even taking budgetary finances back to the original figure. Consequently, BMI expects health care expenditure for the whole of 2010 to once again decline, as it did in 2009.

Given the pressures on financing and the difficult economic conditions, Latvia's position in BMI’s Business Environment Rating (BER) matrix for first-quarter 2011 does not appear any more promising than previously. Latvia again ranks third from the bottom, having fallen to 18th from 15th, out of the 20 markets surveyed in fourth-quarter 2010. The country's pharmaceutical consumption growth will remain muted, and BMI expects per-capita expenditure to fall to under $168, down from $207 in 2009, although the unfavorable exchange rate is also partly to blame for this massive decline.