The Economics of Obesity-Related Mortality Among High Income Countries

Kyrre Rickertsen, Abebayehu Tegene, Sonya Kostova Huffman and Wallace Huffman

No 18211, Working Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper establishes the econometric underpinning of an aggregate household health production function and an aggregate household health supply function for developed countries. The conceptual model builds on productive household models for health. A pooled time series cross sectional model of obesity-related mortality is fitted to annual data for 18 high income countries over 1971-2001. In the health production function, we show that obesity-related mortality is related to diet, socialized medicine, and trend dominated factors such as medical knowledge and technology. In the health supply function, we show that cheap food increases obesity-related mortality and a modest level of socialized medicine reduces it. The results for labor market variables imply that individuals who are in the labor force burn more calories in their daily activities than do those who do not work in the market and have lower obesity-related mortality.

Keywords: Health; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/18211/files/wp060021.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Economics of Obesity-Related Mortality among High Income Countries (2006)
Working Paper: The Economics of Obesity-Related Mortality Among 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:ags:genres:18211

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.18211

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().