The Impact of Regionalism on Health Tourism in Muslim Countries

Rapid developments in organizational technologies and processes, advancement of knowledge and development of management science in the field of health services on the one hand and increasing the costs of providing and providing care on the other hand have caused strategists and policy makers in the sector. To make the planning, presentation and evaluation processes of health services more effective and efficient by using the various capabilities of e-commerce and information technology. In this regard, the present study has researched health tourism and trade of this type of services in Muslim member countries of the Islamic Conference.

This article is based on the comparative advantage of 50 Muslim countries in the period 1990 to 2017 using the panel data method, and using the dependent variable of health tourism and independent variables including economic size, population size, distance of countries, exchange rate, tax rate, Common language, regional arrangements, the Organization for Economic Co-operation, eight developing Islamic countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Western Maghreb have been examined.

According to the acceptable value of F-Limer statistic and significant value that is less than 0.05 and the results of Haussmann test, the model will fit the panel data using the fixed effects method. The results of the present study indicate that by increasing the effective economic size by one percent, the improvement of health tourism will increase by about 0.1 percent. The obtained negative coefficient of the border distance variable shows the effect of 17% of this variable on the improvement of health tourism.