The Healthcare Industry in the Chinese Economy: Insights from Input–Output Analysis

In the context of urbanization and rapidly aging population, China faces the need to improve and modernize its domestic healthcare system. The Chinese government has identified the improvement of quality of healthcare services and the adoption of new technologies as key priorities in the future to overcome service disparities.1 Government reforms affect pharmaceutical, medical equipment, and diagnostics industries in the country. In this chapter of the book, after a brief description of market trends and general characteristics of trade flows between Europe and China, we implement a dispersion effects analysis using an Input–Output model in order to determine whether healthcare industry is a “key” sector in the Chinese economy compared to the upstream and downstream connections with all the other sectors