THE CURRENT GROWTH EFFECT OF HEALTH TOURISM MARKET DEVELOPMENT IN TURKEY FOR THE EVALUATION ON CURRENT ACCOUNT DEFICIT

Abstract

Tourism sector is one of the major driving forces to develop the Turkish economy which provides the positive contributions with new employment opportunities and the national income and payments. With aid of this developments in economy by tourism, it has also increased the interaction with alternative areas. Health Tourism is also one of the special areas in which provides to the country high added value and foreign currency exchange income. Since the revenue outcome by health tourism is reaching up to 100 billion dollars, the national policy of health tourism enable countries has been undertaken as a high interested point of investment needed area. The critical threshold of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is 4 to 5 percent as a current account balance and this deficient outcome in Turkey mostly takes on 5 to 4 percent which is a considered as a critical threshold. Health Tourism is expected to play a key role in bringing the values to the positive levels and therefore the focus is becoming on this area by health sector. Developing countries such as India, Singapore, and Thailand meet their foreign trade deficits with the income where they have obtained from this specific sector and the level of growth in this sector is at certain rate every year. The health Tourism is very crucial and significant sector for such a country Turkey, who has current budget deficit, and it is real economic sense. With Covid-19 crisis, the plans related with health tourism is re-evaluated by the coordination between Turkish Ministry of Health, Ministry of Tourism and Ministry of Economy. Especially, with the infrastructure works carried for public and city hospitals has been capable of providing health tourism services within the organization which is called “USHAŞ (International Health Services)”. The health tourism sector offers significant opportunities for Turkey during Covid-19 pandemic effects on our current account deficit and the decline in economic recovery of our tourism industry and losses. With health tourism created opportunities is already in an increasing trend, to contribute to the country’s economy much faster by increasing target markets with public-private cooperation.