Effect of healh tourism on economic growth in Turkey: 2003-2016 period

Health tourism is one of the travels people have started to go to various parts of the world. In other words, people temporarily stay in another country for the implementation of various health-care and developmental treatments outside their country. Health tourism is a sector in which human labor is intensively performed. Growth of the health tourism industry in developing countries like Turkey is an opportunity to increase national income. Indeed, in a country where human capital exists, with an important employment provider with in the service sector, The development of health tourism provides the great opportunity fore conomic growth through foreign exchange in flows to the country's economy. Every year, when about 600 million health tourist seven visit from cross continental countries to get health care around the world and consequently a profit volume of over 100 billion dollars were considered, health tourism gives us a significant amount of information about the size with in the service sector. In this study, it is aimed to examine effects of healh tourism on economic growh in Turkey between 2003-2016 period. Time series analysis method was used in this study. Eviews 9.0 program was utilized for analysis. Firstly, time path and correlations graphs of the variables were drawn. Then, ADF and PP unit root test was applied. As a result of ensuring stabilitiy, Maki cointegration test was applied to investigate the long-term relationship. The Toda- Yamamota and Hacker Hatemi-J Boostrap causality tests were conducted to determine the direction of the causation. As a result, according to the econometric analyzes, effects of healh tourism on economic growth were supported. Similarly, contributions of tourism incomes on economic growh have been seen. Keywords: Health Tourism, Economic Growth, Gross Demestic Product, Time Series Analysis