Can inbound medical tourism boost Malaysia’s economic growth?

Medical tourism is an extensively researched sub-sector of the tourism industry because of its acknowledged role as an important catalyst for economic growth. Nevertheless, the impact of medical tourism on economic growth remains contentious due to associated negative externalities. This paper assesses medical tourism’s role in Malaysia’s long-term economic growth using a neoclassical growth model as its framework and a set of time series econometric approaches, namely cointegration, Granger causality and variance decomposition analysis as core instruments. The results indicate that medical tourism has significant positive impact on Malaysia’s economic growth in the long run