Globalization and Obesity
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Abstract
Obesity has been growing around the world during the last few decades leading the World Health Organization to announce the global obesity epidemic. This study focuses on identifying the impacts of different economic and socio-economic variables on the growth of obesity, as well as forecasting and monitoring this growth. A static model is developed using foreign direct investments (FDI) and trade openness as proxies for economic globalization factors and globalization social index as a proxy for social globalization. Data are collected for 76 countries over the period 1986-2008. The fixed effects model and quantile regression were used to analyze the data. A dynamic model is also set up via a differential equation to monitor the spreading of obesity. The Golden Section Search is then used to find the values for the parameters representing the number of overweight people becoming obese and the time response between the increase of overweight and the increase of obesity. Results imply that social globalization and FDI adversely impact obesity in less and medium developed countries while they have no impact on obesity rates in developed countries. Trade openness generally has no impact on changes in obesity rates across quantiles. The implications of globalization are different for different countries and regions. High social cost of obesity is surely to lower the benefits of globalization, especially in less developed countries which are the most responsive to these external influences. The dynamic model developed to monitor the spreading of obesity for three different regions: the United States, the World and the European Union, showed that the United States has the biggest proportion of overweight people becoming obese while the European Union has the least. The model also indicated that this increase occurs over a much longer period of time for the European Union than the United States experiences this increase in really short period of time after the increase in overweight.