Urban child health: does parent characteristics matter?

Normaz Wana Ismail, Sudha Sivadas (), Rusmawati Said () and Azmawani Abd Rahman ()
Additional contact information
Sudha Sivadas: University Putra Malaysia
Rusmawati Said: University Putra Malaysia
Azmawani Abd Rahman: University Putra Malaysia

International Journal of Economic Policy Studies, 2021, vol. 15, issue 2, No 5, 349-365

Abstract: Abstract Lifestyle changes due to urbanization in Malaysia are increasingly pronounced. Although only an upper middle-income country, obesity levels among Malaysian children were comparable to children from high-income countries. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the prevalence of obesity among children, including the impact of urbanization and parental socio-demographic background that contribute to its rise. Using secondary data from the Malaysian National Health and Morbidity Survey, we explore factors that contribute to the rising prevalence of overweight and obese children by employing the multinomial probit regression. These surveys are cross-sectional population studies, involving approximately between 30,000 and 56,000 respondents with a response rate above 84%. Findings show overweight and obesity prevalence in urban areas are influenced by the various demographic, socioeconomic and lifestyle-related factors. This study find that urban children are 1.7% less overweight while obesity increased by 20% between 2006 and 2015. In term of parent’s characteristics, parent education does not seem to have an impact as children from households headed by those without formal education record higher prevalence. In summary, factors that influenced urban children to become overweight in 2006 still persists after a decade.

Keywords: Child health; Obesity; Overweight; Malaysia; Socioeconomic; Urbanization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s42495-021-00062-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:ijoeps:v:15:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s42495-021-00062-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... policy/journal/42495

DOI: 10.1007/s42495-021-00062-5

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Economic Policy Studies is currently edited by Akira Maeda

More articles in International Journal of Economic Policy Studies from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().