Infectious disease risk and international tourism demand [Summary]

Abstract

The results show that, in the case of Malaria, Dengue, Yellow Fever and Ebola, the eradication of these diseases in the affected countries would result in an increase of around 10 million of tourist worldwide and a rise in the tourism expenditure of 12 billion dollars. By analyzing the economic benefits of the eradication of Dengue, Ebola, Malaria, and Yellow Fever for the tourist sector—a strategic economic sector for many of the countries where these TRD are present—this paper explores a new aspect of the quantification of health policies which should be taken into consideration in future international health assessment programmes. It is important to note that the analysis is only made of the direct impact of the diseases’ eradication and consequently the potential multiplicative effects of a growth in the GDP, in terms of tourism attractiveness, are not evaluated. Consequently, the economic results can be considered to be skeleton ones. "This article summary is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY).