Table 6.

Reference price system in Croatia and in the European Union (EU) Member States, 2010*

Reference price systems	Croatia and EU Member States
Existence:
in place	BE, BG, CZ, DE, DK, EE, EL, ES, FI, FR, HR, HU, IT, LT, LV, NL, PL, PT, RO, SI, SK
abolished	SE
never introduced	AT, CY, IE, LU, MT, UK
Clustering of reference groups:
at ATC 5 level	BE, DK, EE, EL, ES, FI, FR, IT, LT, PT, RO, SI
at ATC 5 and 4 level	BG†, CZ, HU†, SK
at ATC 5, 4 and 3 level and at different criteria	DE, HR, LV, NL, PL
Calculation of reference price:
lowest price of products in the group	BG, CZ, DE, DK, EE, FR, HU, HR, IT, LT, LV, PL, RO, SI, SK
below average of prices of products in the group	DE, ES, FI
(around) average	(BE‡), EL, NL
above average	PT

*Source: Survey by the authors, information provided by members of the Pharmaceutical Pricing and Reimbursement Information network. Country abbreviations are explained in the Table 1.

†Anatomic Therapeutic Chemical classification 4 (ATC, http://www.whocc.no/atc/structure_and_principles/) only for a few products.

‡The reference price is set at 30% below the price of the original product in the cluster, which eventually leads to a reference price around the average of the prices of all products in the reference group, as the setting of the reference price is regularly followed by price decreases undertaken by manufacturers of the products in the group.