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HEALTH TOURISM IN ITALY AND CROATIA - COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL EFFECTS AND POTENTIALS
Abstract
Health tourism as a niche has emerged and has rapidly grown to become a very significant and promising industry. In the European Union, health tourism market is definitely a new and strong trend, with total revenues of 46.9 billion EUR, which is equal to 4.6% of all tourism revenues and 0.33% of the EU-28 GDP in 2014. The purpose of this paper is to describe main attributes and to analyze some of the health tourism challenges in Italy and Croatia. In addition, the financial effects of these health tourism markets are compared and evaluated. Research results indicate that there is a reasonable ground to state that health tourism in Italy and Croatia can be a strong and reliable contributor to the economy of these countries in general, as well as a key factor for the sustainable development and seasonality reduction of tourism. However, there are still many limitations for these health tourism markets. This paper aims to give a qualitative and quantitative overview of the current health tourism markets in Italy and Croatia, and to evaluate their role in tourism in general in order to identify gaps in empirical and statistical research about the development and economic outcomes of health tourism.
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