THE INCREASING TREND OF MEDICAL TOURIST FROM NORTH SUMATERA TO MALAYSIA: ANALYSIS ON SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS

Year 2013, Volume: 5 Issue: 1, 74 - 84, 01.06.2013

Destanul Aulia Sri Fajarayu

Abstract

It is MacReady (2007) who believed that there will be an up in the trend of
medical tourism, this industry will grow about 20% worldwide. This could
happen because of the socioe-conomic factors that support this condition. As
reported by SERI (2004), Leng (2006) and Tourism Malaysia (2010), Indonesian
patients have been the largest foreign patients visited Malaysia. This trend is
interesting to learn further and this study aims at finding out the macroeconomic
factors which have influenced the numbers of people from North Sumatera
seeking for medical treatment in Malaysia. Using secondary data, this survey
study has regressed the number of North Sumatran medical tourist (as the
dependent variable) for the period of 2000-2011 to the independent variables such
as exchange rate, inflation and income per capita in order to find out the economic
determinant of number of medical tourists from North Sumatera. The
demographic determinant choosen to study as the only independent variable is
population for the same period of study. Finally, in order to incorporate the health
seeking behavior point of view, this study used independent variables such as life
expectancy, health facilities, number of doctors and level of education as the
determinant for the number of medical tourists from North Sumatera. The result
of regression for economic determinant showed that income and exchange rate
were positively and statistically significant determinant for the number of medical
tourists while the independent variable of inflation is not responsive to the
changes in the dependent variable of number of medical tourist. The result of
single regression of the independent variable of population was found
significantly and positively to have affected the number of medical tourist. From
four of the health seeking behaviours as dependent variables, it is found that life
expectancy and the number of health facilities was responsive to the changes of
the number of medical tourist while the number of doctors and level of education
was not.

Keywords

medical tourism, demand determinant, health seeking behavior

References

• Andersen R.M. 1995. Revisiting the behavioral model and access to medical care:
• Does it matter? Journal of Health and Social Behavior 36(1):1-10
• Connell, J. 2006. Medical tourism: Sea, sun, sand and surgery. Tourism Management27(6):1093–1100.
• Crouch, G. I. (1995). A meta-analysis of tourism demand.Annals of Tourism Research, 22(1), 103-118.
• Crouch, G. I. 1994. The study of international tourism demand: A review of the findings. Journal of Travel Research 33(2):12-13
• Di Matteo, J. 1999. Using alternative methods to estimate the determinants of cross-border trips.Applied Economics 31:77-88.
• Eilat, Y. & Einav, L. (2004). Determinants of international tourism: A three- dimensional panel data analysis. Applied Economics, 36(12), 1315-1327.
• Garin-Munoz, T. &Amaral, T. P. (2000). An econometric model for international tourism flows to Spain. Applied Economics Letters, 7(8), 525-529.
• Greene, W. H. (2003). Econometric analysis (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.
• Gu, H. &Kavanaugh, R. R. (2006). A critique of market analysis for suburban tourism in Beijing, China.Journal of Vacation Marketing, 12(1), 27-39.
• Kauffman, P. (2007). Global tourism winners: How countries and companies succeed in tourism. The Business Review, Cambridge, 8(1), 107-113.
• MacReady, N. (2007). Developing countries court medical tourists. The Lancet, (9576):18-49.
• Martin C. A. and Witt, S. F. (1987). Tourism demand forecsting models: Choice of appropriate variable to represent tourists’ cost of living. Tourism Management (3)233-245
• Hanafiah, M.H.,Harun, M. F. and Jamaluddin, M. R. 2010. Bilateral trade and tourism demand. World Applied Sciences Journal 10:110-114
• Turner, L.W. and S.F. Witt, 2001. Factors influencing demand for international tourism: Tourism demand analysis using structural equation modeling. Tourism Economics 7(1): 21-38.
• Varian, H. (1992).Microeconomic analysis (3rd ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company
• Zaratiegui, J. M. (2002). Marshallian demand function and the adjustment of competitive markets.International Journal of Applied Economics & Econometrics, 10(3), 369-380.