Food and beverage television advertising exposure and youth consumption,body mass index and adiposity outcomes

This study examines the relationships between exposure to food and beverage product television advertisements and consumption and obesity outcomes among youth. Individual‐level data on fast food and soft drink consumption and body mass index (BMI) for young adolescents from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, kindergarten cohort, (1998–1999) and adiposity measures for children from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2003–2004) were combined with designated market area (DMA) Nielsen media advertising ratings data. To account for unobserved individual‐level and DMA‐level heterogeneity, various fixed‐ and random‐effects models were estimated. The results showed that exposure to soft drink and sugar‐sweetened beverage (SSB) advertisements is economically and statistically significantly associated with higher frequency of soft drink consumption among youth even after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, with elasticity estimates ranging from 0.4 to 0.5. The association between fast food advertising exposure and fast food consumption disappeared once we controlled for unobservables. Exposure to cereal advertising was significantly associated with young adolescents' BMI percentile ranking, but exposures to fast food and soft drink advertisements were not. The results on adiposity outcomes revealed that children's exposure to cereal advertising was associated with both percent body fatness and percent trunk fatness; fast food advertising was significantly associated with percent trunk fatness and marginally significantly associated with percent body fatness; and exposure to SSB advertising was marginally significantly associated with percent body and trunk fatness. The study results suggest that continued monitoring of advertising is important and policy debates regarding the regulation of youth‐directed marketing are warranted.     

Evaluating effects on the flow of electrical and electronic equipment and energy consumption due to alternative consumption patterns in China

In this paper, we evaluated the effects of consumer’s behavioural changes on usage and disposal of home appliances. With the model to estimate the product circulation, first we conducted the sensitivity analysis with the six parameters, namely urbanisation, household size, Gini coefficient, product lifetime and selection rate of used product and high energy efficiency product. Then, secondly we evaluated CO₂ emission and e-waste generation from four consumers’ different behavioural patterns, which are named as ‘Business As Usual’ (BAU), ‘Rapid Cycling’ (RC), ‘Chain of Users’ (CU) and ‘Quality and Wisdom’ (QW). As a result, the QW scenario was the best lifestyle in both criteria. Further, RC scenario had an advantage on the reduction in e-waste generation in one hand, but CU scenario reduced more CO₂ emission. During the transition era of China from materially poor to rich, it could be one of the solutions to utilise energy-efficient second-hand product to improve the living standards of the poor and replace technologically inferior product stocks in poor households.