Essays on health tourism and econonomic

This thesis contributes to the understanding of the relationship between health tourism and economics. The thesis, titled Essays on health tourism and economics, will consist of three chapters in which three independent primary researches are evaluated together. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 sheds light on the thesis with a bibliometric analysis and a scientific mapping of health tourism and medical tourism as a subtopic of health tourism, while Chapter 3 analyzes the strategic behavior of medical tourism companies in the market and the mechanisms of volatility transfer in a quantitative framework. The first chapter, bibliographic data were taken from Web of Science Core Collection (WoS), Scopus and PubMed databases in order to eliminate the limitation in bibliometric data. Thus, it is thought that the study will provide important information about the gaps in the literature and contribute to a better understanding of future trends. A bibliometric analysis of publications in the field of health tourism in the time period from 1990 to 2023 in Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) (2243), Scopus (830) and Pubmed (360) databases, which host high quality and influential scientific articles, was conducted. While 'health', 'tourism', 'health care' and 'economic growth' were prominent in health tourism studies in WOS between 1990-2019, the concepts of 'health' and 'impact' came to the fore in the 2020-2023 period. According to Scopus data, 'tourism' and 'human' are at the forefront in 1991-2015, 'human', 'adult' and 'Coronavirus disease 2019' in 2016-2023. According to PubMed data, while concepts such as 'humans', 'stem cell transplantation' and 'communication' came to the fore in 2013-2016, concepts such as 'medical tourism-economics/ethics', 'global health', 'travel', 'transients and migrants' came to the fore in 2017-2022. The last section analyzes the volatility spillovers of the 8 largest and most liquid medical tourism companies (BDMS, AH, IHH, IHH, BH, FH, MMS, RHC, FMC) between 02.01.2018 and 12.12.2024 using the Diebold-Yılmaz interconnectedness framework. Thus, this study identifies dynamic market relationships by examining the relationship between the stock volatility of the top eight major companies listed on the country stock exchanges that play an active role in global medical tourism. Long-term volatility in the medical tourism industry is shaped by systemic, structural and macroeconomic factors that affect companies over a long period of time. Unlike fluctuations, the dynamics reflect sustainable trends, strategic changes and strong interdependencies. Global health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have been found to create structural shocks that persist not only during the emergency response period, but also during periods when the effects of the crisis are felt for a long time. With this study, we aimed to create a detailed scientific map of health tourism and its sub-branch, medical tourism, through bibliometric analysis, to examine the strategic approaches of medical tourism companies that have survived despite various crises, and to analyze the volatility transfer mechanisms in a quantitative framework and to offer insights that will guide researchers and policymakers for the future of the field. Keywords: Health Tourism, Medical Tourism, Bibliometric Analysis, Diebold-Yılmaz Linkage, TVP-VAR,