Economic Growth, Obesity and Global Burden of Disease: An Exploration

Abstract

In recent years, obesity has increased in the emerging economies to a level. Economic growth plays an important role in increasing the obesity in a country. The present study is an attempt to examine the effect of economic growth in the increasing obesity and its relationship with global burden of disease. To carry out this study different regions are taken like south Asia, Latin America and Caribbean, Europe and central Asia, North Africa and Middle east and Sub Saharan African. Economic performance is measured through GDP. Obesity is measured through the calories intake per day by a person in these regions. Total health spending, out of pocket spendings share of health spending, development assistance as share of total health spending, diabetes and hypertension are included as variables. To examine the relationship, graphs of all these variable are made and comparison has been done for these regions. The results show that GDP growth or economic growth has a significant impact in increasing ratio of obesity. As economic growth increases, per capita income of people also increases. People have more money to spend on food and their food shift from low calories to high calories. Excess of calories changes into fat by the body and then this fat converted into obesity. Due to obesity different diseases create like diabetes and hypertension due to which mortality rate also increases. So obesity is also a cause of increasing the global burden of diseases. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the government of these regions should encourages the people by teaching them about obesity in institutions.