The Impact of Health-Related and Economic Factors on Tourism: A Research on the Leading Countries in Medical Tourism

Accessibility of quality and affordable healthcare services is a fundamental need for everyone globally and medical tourism helps facilitate it. Therefore, medical tourism is very important for all individuals and countries; and the factors that effect medical tourism are just as important. Healthcare services are naturally at the center of medical tourism. Moreover, it is known that economic factors affect every sector. Hence, we used several health-related and economic factors as explanatory variables. On the other hand, as there is not enough global, systematic and regularly updated medical tourism specific data yet, we used tourism data which naturally encompass medical tourism data as separate dependent variables. We conducted multivariate regression analyses and found that the increases in health expenditure and decreases in infant mortality rate significantly increase tourist arrivals and tourism receipts in the leading countries in medical tourism. Our findings thus suggest that medical tourists indeed do pay attention to health-related factors when choosing a medical tourism destination and that improving the healthcare services provided in a country may significantly increase the competitiveness of the country in medical tourism.