In recent years, almost all countries around the world face budget cuts in health spending, which force public and private hospitals in these countries to use their resources effectively and to provide more efficient health care. In this context, the present study evaluates hospital efficiency across 29 OECD countries between 2000 and 2010 and investigates the determinants affecting hospitals' activities. In the first stage of the twostage performance analysis, efficiency scores of the hospitals were measured by data envelopment analysis (DEA) while, in the second stage, Panel Tobit Analysis was used to identify the environmental factors that affect the efficiency scores obtained in the first stage. The paper also explores the changes in the factor efficiency compared to the previous years by decomposition through the Malmquist Productivity Index. In the first stage, it was found that the efficiency scores achieved after 2000 began to decline in 2004 and reached their lowest levels between 2009 and 2010. The highest slack values were found in the figures regarding tomography, MR, and nurses, respectively. In the second stage, due to the censored nature of the dependent variable obtained by DEA, in order to achieve consistent and unbiased estimators, the use of Panel Tobit Analysis was proposed. Estimations showed that, among the environmental factors that secondarily affect hospital efficiency, income, education and number of private hospitals affect efficiency in a positive way, while the effects of public and private health expenses and the number of public hospitals on such efficiency was negative.

Turkey occupies eighth place in the world for cave tourism. In recent years, the development of the cave tourism industry throughout the country and the emergence of its positive and negative impacts have attracted the interest of rural development experts, local managers and scholars. Most research is related to scientific studies in caverns, but there has been insufficient study of the profiles of visitors, expenditure patterns and problems experienced by cave tourism destinations. The main aim of this study is to analyse the determinants of the expenditure of same-day visitors on cave tourism, the socio-economic characteristics of the tourists and their attitudes towards the Ballica Cave as a tourist destination. Data were collected from 598 visitors via a questionnaire survey. The double log function was used to determine visitor expenditure on cave tourism. The geographical position of the cave and characteristics of the visitors were taken into consideration when specifying the model. According to the findings, the effect of household income on visitor expenditure was positive but not significant. Distance, age, level of education and gender were important determinants of expenditure. In addition, the majority of respondents thought that the advertising of the Ballica Cave was inadequate. Relatives, friends and neighbours were the main information sources for visitors to the cave.

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Healthier people contribute more to the development of the economy. Besides, in a better economy, people have a better quality and healthier life. At this stage, one has to ask which one precedes the other: health or wealth? To find the answer, this study aims to investigate the causality relationship between health and inclusive wealth in the European countries for the period of 1990–2015. The causality between health and inclusive wealth scores, which are estimated by cluster and discriminant analyses, is investigated by the panel causality test. The research results indicate bidirectional causality between health and inclusive wealth. A one-way causality is detected in 11 cases as being from inclusive wealth to health and in 8 the other way. Furthermore, a two-way causality is found in 2 countries. Among the results, it is noteworthy that 91% of the countries with causality from inclusive wealth to health are among the healthy countries.

Many countries devote an increasing proportion of their economic resources to produce and provide health care services. Looking at the written economic literature, it can be seen that although there is work on convergence in health expenditures, these studies are generally based on linearity assumption. In this study, the validity of the convergence hypothesis on the public, private and total per capita health expenditures are analyzed by non-linear panel unit root tests in a sample of 18 OECD countries, covering Turkey, over the period 1979-2016. The findings of the analysis show that the convergence hypothesis is valid only for private per capita health expenditure.