introduction: medical tourism as one of the dimensions of tourism is helping in sustainable development and dynamics of the economy. considering the low cost and high income of the industry and its role on strengthening country health structures, many developing countries focused their attention on the industrial sector and planning for it. the purpose of this research was to investigate effect...

Issues in the macro-environment are affecting the historic relationships that have existed between hospitals and their medical staffs over the last half century. Rising healthcare costs, deteriorating relationships, unexplained variations in clinical outcomes, transparency in healthcare outcomes, medical tourism, competition between hospitals and physicians, and reluctance by hospitals and phys...

Due to the rise of businesses utilizing the sharing economy concept, it is important to better understand the motivational factors that drive and hinder collaborative consumption in the travel and tourism marketplace. Based on responses from 754 adult travellers residing in the US, drivers and deterrents of the use of peer-to-peer accommodation rental services were identified. Factors that dete...

In 1990, in an attempt to deal with the devastating impact the collapse of the Soviet bloc inflicted on the Cuban economy, Cuban authorities announced the start of “the special period in time of peace,” an economic adjustment program. The following year the Fourth Communist Party Congress ratified the program and spelled out its main components: (a) a food (Plan Alimentario) and energy import s...

In a global and interconnected economy, decision makers often need to consider information from various domains. A tourism destination manager, for example, has to correlate tourist behavior with financial and environmental indicators to allocate funds for strategic long-term investments. Statistical data underpins a broad range of such cross-domain decision tasks. A variety of statistical data...

This paper analyzes the evolution of pay inequality in Cuba from the early 1990s through 2004 during what was known as the “Special Period in Times of Peace” and after. We measured pay inequality across sectors and regions using the between-groups component of Theil’s T statistic, and we mapped the changing components of that statistic in order to provide a compact summary of structural change ...

GIS can be used in tourism as a decision supporting tool for sustainable tourism planning, impact assessment, visitor flow management, and tourism site selection. Therefore, the potential for GIS applications in tourism is significant. The purpose of the study was fixed to explore the potential of using GIS for planning resources pertinent to ecotourism development. The study investigated a cas...

It is widely accepted that technological change underpins a global economy and that geographic location and concentration is of foremost importance for tourism development and competitive advantage. This paper discusses the role of tourism networks, clustering and destination value chains for micro and small and medium size tourism enterprises (SMEs) in freely assembled destinations. In discuss...

The limits of tourism development-the problem Despite many examples of inappropriate tourism development around the world, several destinations are still trapped by an almost inevitable vicious circle which destroys the very essence of tourism. Tourism is supposedly developed in order to improve the prosperity of local people at destinations, mainly through stimulating their local economy. Howe...