About the data
The Access to Medicine Index gives insight into what the pharmaceutical industry is doing to improve access to medicine across the world. It independently ranks and evaluates the world's largest pharmaceutical companies on their policies and practices for improving access to medicine in developing countries and has been published every two years since 2008.
20 companies were analysed by the 2014 Index which together accounts for more than 50% of the global pharmaceutical market.
More detailed information is available here: http://www.accesstomedicineindex.org/ranking
Methodology
The framework is constructed along seven areas of focus, which cover the range of company business activities that experts consider most relevant to access to medicine. Within each area, the Index assesses four aspects of company action: commitment, transparency, performance and innovation. In 2014 there were 95 indicators.
The Index is a relative ranking, where companies are compared with each other rather than against an absolute. The highest attainable scores for each indicator do not reflect an ideal characteristic of industry behaviour, but a culmination of stakeholder views of what can be reasonably expected of companies. Additionally, companies do not receive negative scores in indicators, meaning they can never score below zero.
More detailed methodology is available here: http://www.accesstomedicineindex.org/methodology-0