Over-Nutrition and Changing Health Status in High Income Countries

Wallace Huffman, Sonya Huffman (), Kyrre Rickertsen and Abebayehu Tegene

Forum for Health Economics & Policy, 2010, vol. 13, issue 1, 44

Abstract: As per capita incomes in developed countries have grown over the past three decades, over-nutrition leading to obesity and elevated health risks for cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer has occurred. We use economic and econometric models to identify the impact of food prices on the aggregate demand for calories and the supply of health, as reflected in mortality rates. Our models are fitted to unique panel data for 18 developed countries over 1971-2001, a period when the relative price of food first rose and then declined steadily. Some findings, using de-trended data, are that a lower real price of food, of other purchased consumer goods and of time increase the demand for calories, one cause of energy imbalance, and the supply of mortality associated with obesity. These prices do not affect the rate of non-obesity-related mortality. Caloric intake is a normal good, contributing to energy imbalance as income increases, but higher incomes do reduce mortality risk. However, higher labor force participation rates, largely associated with rising numbers of working women, and a higher child dependency ratio lead to a higher rate of obesity-related mortality. An implication of our results is that further reductions in the price of food in developed countries can be expected to have a net negative impact on health as reflected in a higher mortality rate due to diseases that are linked to obesity--diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and most forms of cancer.

Keywords: health; mortality; calories; over-nutrition; obesity; food prices; developed countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1558-9544.1181 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
Working Paper: Over-Nutrition and Changing Health Status in High Income Countries (2010)
Working Paper: Over-Nutrition and Changing Health Status in High Income Countries (2010)
Working Paper: Over-Nutrition and Changing Health Status in High Income Countries (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:fhecpo:v:13:y:2010:i:1:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/fhep/html

DOI: 10.2202/1558-9544.1181

Access Statistics for this article

Forum for Health Economics & Policy is currently edited by Dana Goldman

More articles in Forum for Health Economics & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().