ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Health Economics
This article is part of the Research TopicReal-World Evidence and its Impact on Sustainable Health Financing, Economics and OutcomesView all 5 articles
The Impact of the Sports Industry on the Development of the Health Industry: An Exploration Based on Mediating Effects and Threshold Effects
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shanghai University of Sport, Shanghai, China
- 2West Anhui University, Lu'an, China
- 3Beijing Sport University, Beijing, China
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Introduction: The sports and health industries play a crucial role in fulfilling individuals' aspirations for an enhanced quality of life and in supporting the development of a Healthy China. Methods: To explore the impact mechanism of the sports industry on the development of the health industry, this study employed a rigorous empirical framework utilizing panel data from 30 provinces in China over the period 2014–2023. Through the application of fixed-effects and mediation-effect models, this study examined the influence mechanism and identified the key pathways through which the sports industry impacts the development of the health industry. Results: The results demonstrate that the sports industry exerts a positive influence on the development of the health industry. This conclusion remains robust across a series of robustness tests. The heterogeneous analysis reveals regional variation in the impact of the sports industry on the health industry development. Among the regions, the sports industry has the strongest promotional effect on health industry development in the western regions, followed by the eastern and central regions. In contrast, the impact in the northeastern regions is relatively negligible. Mediation effect analysis reveals that the sports industry can effectively stimulate the development of the health industry by significantly increasing R&D intensity. Furthermore, testing the threshold effect indicates that the impact of the sports industry on the health industry exhibits a double threshold effect and the nonlinear characteristic of diminishing marginal effects. Discussion: This study contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the sports industry's impact on the health industry. Based on these findings, we proposed a series of targeted recommendations.
Keywords: health industry, Sports industry, Fixed effect, Mediating effect, threshold effect, Influence mechanism
Received: 23 Aug 2025; Accepted: 31 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhao and Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Haiyan Huang, suszst@sus.edu.cn
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