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1. Introduction
The healthcare sector consists of many industries including pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, equipment manufacturing, distribution, residential care facilities and managed healthcare. Healthcare contributes significantly to economic output in the USA and other developed economies. Healthcare is a strong and fast-growing sector with estimated values of $9 and $3.2 trillion in the world and in the USA, respectively (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2016). In the USA, national health expenditure has increased from 5.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1960 to almost 18 percent in 2015 (Sing et al., 2006). Healthcare is central to job creation accounting for 10 and 12 percent of the total employment in the European Union and the USA, respectively (Morland et al., 2002). In general, there is a strong relationship between income levels and healthcare expenditure per capita. In developed economies including the USA, Europe and Japan almost 12 percent of GDP and in emerging economies, about 6 percent of GDP is spent on healthcare. Indeed, healthcare is recognized as a superior sector because human health is the most valuable asset and the source of all other assets; it is the engine of economic growth and prosperity (The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited, 2015). For that reason, healthcare is a predominant occupation of policymakers, business leaders and citizens in the USA and many other developed and emerging countries.
Currently, we are at a crucial stage, as a number of significant trends are remaking the prospects of healthcare. In a world marked by the forces of globalization, demographic shift, social unrest, economic uncertainty and technological innovation, healthcare remains an unusually vibrant and rapidly changing sector. As the healthcare sector is undergoing seismic transformations, governments, businesses and consumers are trying to control costs and provide quality services to their citizens and employees. To meet the rising demands in the next decades, it is essential to make sense of the existing and forthcoming developments. Hence, the current paper aims at analyzing the main global transformations of the healthcare sector and their underlying causes and features. More specifically, the paper focuses on several areas including demographic, medical, clinical, financial, managerial and technological transformations and examines their implications for the healthcare sector. To this end, the remainder of this paper is structured in nine sections dealing with...