The Impact of Socioeconomic and Spatial Differences on Obesity in West Virginia

Anura Amarasinghe, Gerard E. D'Souza, Cheryl Brown and Tatiana Borisova ()

No 21159, 2006 Annual meeting, July 23-26, Long Beach, CA from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association)

Abstract: Obesity constitutes an important public policy issue since it causes external costs to society through increased healthcare costs borne by taxpayers. This study employed random and fixed effects estimations and spatial autoregressive approaches under a panel data structure to unravel possible socioeconomic and built environment factors contributing to obesity. Though there is no statistical evidence for time invariant fixed effects, empirical evidence shows that obesity is a spatially non-random event. Educational attainment that raises both human and social capital as well as changes in the built environment could play a vital role in controlling obesity.

Keywords: Health; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/21159/files/sp06am03.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:aaea06:21159

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.21159

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Annual meeting, July 23-26, Long Beach, CA from American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().