The Healthcare Industry in the MENA Region and Its Policy Implications for Korea-MENA Healthcare Cooperation

The healthcare industry in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is growing rapidly, owing to the increase in population and life expectancy, as well as healthcare expansion policies. However, medical supplies, medical staff, hospital beds, medical institutions, and healthcare services which each country can supply for itself fall well below demand. Each MENA country is implementing healthcare expansion policies in order to solve the imbalance between supply and demand, as well as to stabilize public sentiment that has been formed since the regional political upheaval of 2011. A quantitative analysis on medical expenditure was conducted by utilizing a two-track approach that analyzes the gap between the tendential medical expenditure and the potential medical expenditure. Through the analysis on medical expenditure, we reviewed the markets and status of healthcare policies of UAE, Iraq, and Egypt as promising MENA countries to be entered by Korea. UAE is a strategic place for Korea's advance into the healthcare industry in the MENA region. In Iraq, where there is steady demand for hospital construction, we need to pay attention to turnkey-based hospital projects. In Egypt, despite the positive outlook on the pharmaceutical industry, we need to approach it from the long-term viewpoint because it is hard to achieve market penetration in the short term due to the political instability. This study proposes "to establish a creative economy through interindustry linkage and convergence among various business categories." For the realization of this policy vision, we propose three policy objectives: interindustry linkage/convergence, development of capabilities of specialists/professionals, and localization.