Life cycle models of women's body mass index and probability of being obese: Evidence from panel data

The objective of this paper is to develop a multiperiod, finite‐life, life cycle models of household decisions on food, leisure, and health (body mass index [BMI] or being obese) and to estimate econometric versions of these models treating SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) participation as endogenous. A key insight from the economic models is that households allocate their wealth over the multiperiod life cycle to equalize the marginal utility of wealth in each period. The observations for this study are a balanced panel of over 1,600 women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort (NLSY79). We focus on the 20‐year period starting in 1986, when SNAP data first became available. Women of all ages are included in the study because at the beginning of adulthood women cannot accurately predict over their life cycle labor and marriage market and health shocks that can thrust them into an economic position where they would qualify for SNAP. New findings include that a woman's household SNAP participation with or without updating for last periods health status and higher local dairy product prices reduce significantly her BMI and probability of being obese.     

Context matters: Oil palm production and women's dietary diversity in the tropical forest of Cameroon

Oil palm is one of the most rapidly expanding food and cash crops in many tropical regions with significant environmental implications, but also economic gains. Previous analyses have established that this expansion is associated with changing gender roles and time allocation for women. Time allocation is an important determinant of maternal and child nutrition as well as well-being. We use a rich farm household survey from a native oil palm production hotspot, Cameroon, to examine the associations between oil palm production and women's dietary diversity. Using different estimation and identification strategies with some sensitivity checks, we show that oil palm is associated with lower dietary diversity for women, measured as the minimum dietary diversity for women and the minimum adequacy diversity diet. We explore heterogeneity in the various food groups consumed by women and show that oil palm production is associated with lower consumption of mainly pulses, fruits and vegetables. These findings contrast with the literature that has established some positive dietary diversity implications of oil palm expansion in Southeast Asia. We carefully discuss these findings and argue that context matters and may explain these differences. Particularly, we show that oil palm production is negatively associated with farm production diversity in Cameroon. Notwithstanding, we also confirm previous findings that highlight that oil palm production is associated with higher income. These insights add to the debate on the implications of oil palm expansion in tropical environments. Moreover, they can guide policy in designing more tailored interventions that address nutrition issues and improve rural development.     

Does food market modernisation lead to improved dietary diversity and diet quality for urban Vietnamese households?

This study investigates the possible mechanisms through which modern food markets may affect Vietnamese households’ dietary diversity and diet quality using data from a survey of 1,700 urban households with seven‐day food recall. We calculate Household Dietary Diversity Scores to measure dietary diversity, and use consumption frequencies of micronutrients (vitamin A and heme iron) and a macronutrient (protein) to create a household measure of diet quality. We estimate a Poisson regression model using a two‐step control function approach to address the potential endogeneity of our key explanatory variable, modern market food expenditure shares. Higher modern market food expenditure share is positively and significantly associated with consumption frequency of heme iron, but there are no significant associations with consumption of vitamin A and protein. We further explore indirect linkages between food expenditure shares and dietary diversity, which in turn, may be linked to household diet quality. Results from a system of equations show that the food expenditure share variable has no significant relationship with dietary diversity, but dietary diversity is positively and significantly associated with diet quality. Our results indicate that alone, policies which encourage ‘food market modernisation’ are not enough to improve diet quality in urban Vietnam.     

Macrorelationship between average life expectancy and prevalence of obesity: Theory and evidence from global data

A large body of literature assesses the impact of obesity on health at the microlevel and finds that obesity is a risk to health and longevity of life. We develop a macrolevel analytical framework to investigate the impact of obesity prevalence on average life expectancy, the trade-off between health expenditure and obesity prevalence, and the differential effect of obesity prevalence by gender, and apply this framework to cross country national data using a panel data of 183 countries for the years 2007 to 2014.  The empirical analysis shows that the average life expectancy is a concave function of obesity prevalence, and an increase in obesity prevalence increases average expected life expectancy with low obesity levels.  While obesity is a significant problem in developed countries, its impact on average life expectancy is partially mitigated by health expenditure. Underweight and lack of health expenditure in developing countries are even more severe problems. The marginal benefit of health expenditure in a low obesity country (highly correlated with underweight) has a larger impact on life expectancy relative to that in a high obesity country. A part of the longer life expectancy of women is related to better average nutritional state and less vulnerability to obesity. The results are consistent over three macromeasures of the longevity of life—average life expectancy, adult mortality rate, and healthy life expectancy.     

Does maternal employment affect child nutrition status? New evidence from Egypt

Even though maternal employment can increase family income, several studies suggest that it could have adverse consequences on children’s health. In this study, we use a nationally representative sample of 12,888 children, aged 0–5 years from Egypt to examine the impact of maternal employment on child nutritional indicators, namely: stunting, wasting, and being underweight and overweight. We adopted various estimation methods to control for observable and unobservable household characteristics in order to identify the causal effect of maternal employment. These different techniques include, propensity score matching (PSM), OLS regression with controlling for a wide range of individual characteristics, and an instrumental variable two-stage least squares (IV 2SLS) approach. Results of the PSM and OLS suggest that maternal employment is weakly associated with having a malnourished child. On the other hand, the IV 2SLS suggests a stronger and significant association between maternal employment and poor nutritional status among children.     

Regional obesity determinants in the United States: a model of myopic addictive behavior in food consumption

Obesity is considered one of the largest public health problems in the United States today. The premise for our study is a body of results from medical research showing that sweetened foods, i.e., an increased consumption of sugars, leads first to sugar addiction and second to carbohydrate addiction and increased consumption of fats. The latter feature is actually responsible for the increase in body mass index (BMI), but the trigger that produces cravings for extra calories is sugar and sweeteners. Based on our results, a myopic model of addictive behavior in food consumption seems to capture the food consuming habits and related outbreak of obesity among the American population. Our results indicate that lower current and past real prices of sugar contribute significantly to higher values of BMI, and increase the likelihood of becoming obese in the United States.     

The effects of nutritional labels on obesity

This study examines the relationship between nutritional label use and obesity using switching regression. Results for treatment effect show that nutritional labels play a role in reducing obesity among users of nutritional labels, notably among women. The average body mass index (BMI) for men who read nutritional labels is 0.12 point lower than men who do not read them, while women who are users of nutritional labels have 1.49 points lower BMI than women who do not read labels. These findings imply that health education campaigns can employ nutritional labels as one of the instruments for reducing obesity.     

Cash transfer program and child underweight—Empirical evidence from a causal mediation analysis

Despite the existence of a voluminous literature on cash transfer programs, little is known about their impacts on the underweight of children. To fill the knowledge gap, this study uses a unique individual panel data set to analyze how participation in the Children Sponsorship Program (CSP) improves underweight status among needy children and adolescents in Taiwan. This study examines not only the program effect on children's underweight, but also underscores the potential pathways behind the program effect by employing a causal mediation analysis. Our analysis finds that exiting the CSP has a negative impact on the improvement of underweight status. Moreover, eating breakfast every day and receiving pocket money from parents can be two significant mediators that link the effect of exiting the CSP and the change in underweight status among children and adolescents.     

Life satisfaction and diet in transition: evidence from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey

This article develops a theoretical framework and provides empirical evidence on the impacts of diet and lifestyles on life satisfaction in Russia using 1995–2005 data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. Our results suggest that diet measured as calories, fat, protein, and diversity of food consumption has a statistically significant effect on life satisfaction levels of the Russian population. In addition, living in a region with higher per capita income increases population's life satisfaction. While living in a rural area, having health problems, and having young children affect individual life satisfaction in Russia in a negative and statistically significantly way. Life satisfaction is also positively correlated with education and income, and negatively with unemployment. Better understanding of the drivers of life satisfaction and more generally of subjective well‐being in Russia can assist in the government decision‐making processes, including the allocation of scarce resources and the design of public health policies.     

The human capital roots of the middle income trap: the case of China

China, like other middle income countries, is facing the challenges of the next stage of development as its leaders seek to guide the nation into becoming a high income country. In this article we explore one of the major challenges that China is facing in the transition from middle to high income: the management of inequality. In particular, we explore the possible roots of future inequality that is associated with a nation's underinvestment in the human capital of broad segments of its population. To meet this goal, we describe two challenges that China faces in the light of rising wage rates and highly unequal income distribution today. We first discuss the structural and institutional barriers that are discouraging many students (and their parents) from staying in school to achieve the levels of learning that we believe are necessary for preparing individuals for employment in the coming decades. We also identify severe nutritional and health problems. We believe that these nutrition and health problems, unless addressed, will continue to create human capital deficiencies in poor areas of rural China and locking in decades of hard‐to‐address inequality.     

Determinants of spatial diversity in modern wheat: examples from Australia and China

The spatial distribution of modern varieties, and the genes they embody, has economic value because it affects crop productivity from year to year. Since farmers choose varieties based on observable traits rather than the genes they cannot see, a first step in understanding the spatial distribution of genes is to better understand the determinants of the spatial distribution of varieties. In this paper, we have constructed spatial diversity indices from area distributions of modern wheat varieties in Australia and China. We hypothesise that factors explaining variation in these indices are related to farmers' demand for traits and the supply of varieties, given physical features of the production environment. We test these hypotheses using reduced form equations for three concepts of spatial diversity, richness, abundance and evenness, using Zellner's seemingly unrelated regression (SUR). Spatial diversity indicators and analyses of this type, if more fully developed and targeted to address specific policy issues, may assist in monitoring crop genetic diversity or ‘refuge’ targets associated with the diffusion of some genetically modified crops.     

Diversity of Mexican diets and agricultural systems and their impact on the land requirements for food

Mexico is a megadiverse country with large agroclimatic diversity and socioeconomic inequality. These two factors result in strong diversity in diets and agricultural systems within the country. In this paper, we assess the impact of Mexican diets and production systems on the per capita land requirements for food. We estimate it for the extremes: from the very basic diet of the poorest share of the population to the affluent diet of the richest share of the population; and for extensive and intensive systems, with irrigation as the indicator of the intensity of the system. We show that the basic diet produced in rainfed systems requires 1620 m²/cap/yr and produced in irrigate systems requires 700 m²/cap/yr. The affluent diet produced in rainfed systems requires 2540 m²/cap/yr and produced in irrigated systems requires 1230 m²/cap/yr. Hence, differences in diets result in a requirement for 80% or 60% more land for an affluent diet; and differences in production systems result in more than twice the amount of land for extensive than for intensive systems. In 2050, it would be possible to feed the entire population with affluent diets only if all the present area of crop land had the productivity of intensive systems. In contrast, it would be possible to feed all people with a basic diet even if all present crop land area had only the productivity of extensive systems.     

Climate,weather and child health in Burkina Faso

It is now clear that anthropogenic climate change is having a negative impact on human health. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive assessment of the impact of climatic stressors on child health in Burkina Faso. We undertake a rigorous empirical analysis of the impact of climate and weather shocks on mortality, stunting (height-for-age Z-score) and wasting (weight-for-age Z-score), using Demographic and Health Surveys, combined with high-resolution meteorological data, controlling for household and individual covariates. We find robust evidence that both lifetime and short-term exposure to high temperatures and droughts have a negative impact on child health, as do increased temperature anomalies during crop seasons, suggesting a link between climate and health through domestic food production. Income and household wealth, access to electricity, sanitation and a health facility for childbirth negate some adverse impacts of climate change. Combining our econometric estimates with updated CMIP6 scenarios, we compute policy-relevant projections of future child health. Our results show that future warming is projected to significantly increase child mortality, and share of underweight and stunted children, in all but the Paris Agreement scenario. Given the links between health, a key element of human capital, and economic growth, our findings and projections provide yet more evidence of the importance of a rapid reduction in global emissions combined with adaptation funding, if lower-income countries are to achieve poverty reduction and increasing prosperity.     

Does Participation in the Food Stamp Program Increase the Prevalence of Obesity and Health Care Spending?

We use panel data techniques and information on state-level Food Stamp Program characteristics to obtain unbiased estimates of the impact of Food Stamp Program participation on weight status and health care spending among nonelderly adults. Our results suggest that program participation by women leads to a 5.9% (p = 0.07) increase in their likelihood of overweight and obesity, which is smaller than previous estimates, and to higher medical expenditures. The direct effect of program participation on medical spending through higher discretionary income is significantly larger than the indirect effect through changes in weight status.     

Matching food security and malnutrition indicators: evidence from Southeast Asia

This article aims to understand the relation between household food security and individual undernutrition. The multitude of indicators available raises the question which aspects of food security are captured by the respective indicator. In our analysis, we first assess the relation between the dimensions of food security and households’ socioeconomic characteristics. Second, we examine whether household indicators detect undernutrition in children. Finally, we investigate the role of individual‐specific characteristics for child undernutrition. The analysis is based on a novel data set of 1,200 rural households from Cambodia and Lao PDR, which combines household‐ and individual‐level data. We capture household food security by three indicators including a dietary diversity score, a consumption behavior measure, and an experiential measure. Individual nutrition status is measured via anthropometric indicators. Our results show that different household‐level indicators capture fundamentally different aspects of food security. Moreover, household food security fails to explain stunting for children under five. Dietary diversity indicators, however, explain underweight in children to a small extent. We call for more research on intrahousehold allocation of food and stress the implications of our research for the design and targeting of food and nutrition support programs.     

Floods,food security,and coping strategies: Evidence from Afghanistan

In this paper, we assess the long‐term effect of floods on food security (as measured by calorie and micronutrient consumption) by applying an instrumental variable approach to data from the Afghanistan National Risk and Vulnerability Assessment survey. To identify the determinants of this effect, we also estimate how floods affect per capita yearly household income and poverty status. We find that exposure to flooding during a 12‐month period decreased daily calorie consumption by approximately 60 kcal while increasing the probability of iron, vitamin A, and vitamin C deficiency by 11, 12, and 27 percentage points, respectively. Controlling for price shocks and income only marginally reduces this flood effect on food security, suggesting that impaired livelihoods (rather than price hikes) are its primary driver. We further determine that exposure to this natural disaster decreases income by about 3% and makes flood‐affected households about 3 percentage points more likely to be poor. Lastly, we show that experience of floods is strongly and significantly associated with lower diet quality and quantity, and with engaging in consumption smoothing coping strategies, such as buying food on credit and taking loans. These findings underscore the serious direct impact of floods on both diet and effective behavioral responses to such shocks while emphasizing the need for targeted micronutrient supplementation in disaster relief and food aid measures even after the period of natural disaster emergency.     

Understanding Heterogeneous Consumer Preferences in Chinese Milk Markets: A Latent Class Approach

We examine heterogeneous consumer preferences in Chinese milk markets. Using a discrete choice experiment, we examine how the brand, quality certification, traceability label and price influence consumers' milk choices. We identify four consumer segments using a latent class model: price conscious (9.8%), balanced thinking (19.8%), health conscious (57.5%), and environment conscious (12.9%) consumers. These four segments have distinct preferences: price conscious consumers prefer green certification; balanced thinking consumers have the highest willingness to pay for traceability labels; health conscious consumers have strong brand awareness; and environment conscious consumers prefer organic certification and traceability labels and use price as a quality signal. Such diversity of consumer preference can be explained by four psychological factors: price consciousness, food safety concerns, health consciousness and environmental concerns.     

Factors Affecting the Extent to which Consumers Incorporate Functional Ingredients into their Diets

This study considers the factors that explain the consumption of food and beverages with functional ingredients to avert or offset health problems. We use an instrumental variables Poisson regression model to deal with the endogeneity of perceived health status in functional ingredient use. The first stage results indicate that perceived health status is associated with attitude towards functional foods, food consumption motives and information seeking and being female. The second stage results suggest that individuals who consume more functional ingredients tend to have a positive attitude towards functional foods, are novelty‐seeking, female and older. As expected, consumption of functional ingredients is more likely when consumers’ self‐reports indicate that they are aware of functional foods’ nutritional value and the link with their own health. Consistent with previous research, most of the socio‐demographics are poor predictors of functional ingredient consumption.     

Food aid and adult nutrition in rural Ethiopia

Insight into the role of safety nets that contribute to adult nutrition is an important component to understanding the dynamics of poverty in developing countries. This article uses panel data from rural Ethiopia on individual nutritional status to test for an effect of public transfers on adult body mass index (BMI). Results show that among adult household members, male members are the primary beneficiaries of food aid as male and female aid recipients tend to invest aid receipts in male household members. These results are consistent with a theory in which additional resources are allocated to members of the household whose market returns are higher or those who engage in activities that expend higher levels of energy. For high‐asset households, female household members benefit if the aid recipient is a female. Women in low‐asset households appear to be adversely affected by aid receipts, and evidence suggests that women with little bargaining power suffer the most. The results suggest that aid receipts are useful in mitigating fluctuations in adult BMI over a short time period.     

Women's Organizations and Social Capital to Reduce Prevalence of Child Malnutrition in Papua New Guinea

Drawing upon survey data in 2000, this article analyses the maturity of women's community-based organizations in Papua New Guinea (PNG), comparing autonomous organizations with those that receive external support. The results of applying the Heckman model suggest that: (1) autonomous Mothers' Groups are more efficient in improving child nutritional status in the weight-for-age measure than those externally supported; and (2) higher maturity of these groups is associated with lower occurrence of underweight. Support for existing autonomous women's organizations is a particularly relevant intervention in PNG; governance with limited trust in formal institutions and modest outreach of services remain issues for large segments of the rural population.