evidence: Access to quality essential medicines at affordable price to patients in the healthcare market is one of the main goals of universal health coverage and health-related sustainable development goals. Healthcare market is imperfect, and the government cannot ensure access to essential medicines if the market is left to operate under invisible hand control. This scoping review was conducted with intention to provide the clear picture on impact of pharmaceutical price regulation on access to essential medicines, drug innovation and launching. [...] Access to essential medicines, which is defined in terms of availability, affordability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of drugs, can be improved by pharmaceutical price regulation. Countries can use different price regulation strategies based on their healthcare objectives and priority healthcare needs. Country-specific pharmaceutical price regulation could not significantly affect drug innovation and launching. However, supportive strategies such as open public funding for drug innovation research, providing innovation awards and strong patent rights can counterbalance the effect of price regulation on innovation and drug development research in developed countries. [...] Benefits of the introduction of price regulation are obtained through reducing excess profits earned by suppliers of medicines. These include increased affordability of essential medicine, reduced healthcare cost to insurers; reduced government healthcare expenditure; and indirect increase on expenditure non-health-related development goals. However, strict targets in terms of price control may cause great economic risk without a comparative advantage. This is because businesses would seek to be more productive by considering more efficient capital replacement decisions that may result in perverse health effects.[90,91]