IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ays/ispwps/paper1914.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Free Trade Agreements and World Obesity

Author

Listed:
  • Michele Baggio

    (Department of Economics, University of Connecticut, USA)

  • Alberto Chong

    (Department of Economics, Georgia State University, USA)

Abstract

We study the causal link between trade openness via free trade agreements and obesity rates. We apply a difference-in-differences approach and exploit the year a country entered a free trade agreement with the United States during the period 1990 to 2016. We find statistically and economically significant results and show that our findings are robust to placebo tests, the use of synthetic control methods, and mechanically maximizing the sample. Additionally, we show that when using event studies the equal trends assumption holds.

Suggested Citation

  • Michele Baggio & Alberto Chong, 2019. "Free Trade Agreements and World Obesity," International Center for Public Policy Working Paper Series, at AYSPS, GSU paper1914, International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
    • Handle: RePEc:ays:ispwps:paper1914
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://icepp.gsu.edu/files/2019/08/paper1914.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dmitry Arkhangelsky & Susan Athey & David A. Hirshberg & Guido W. Imbens & Stefan Wager, 2021. "Synthetic Difference-in-Differences," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 111(12), pages 4088-4118, December.
    2. McGrady,Benn, 2011. "Trade and Public Health," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107008410, September.
    3. Alberto Abadie & Javier Gardeazabal, 2003. "The Economic Costs of Conflict: A Case Study of the Basque Country," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(1), pages 113-132, March.
    4. David M. Cutler & Edward L. Glaeser & Jesse M. Shapiro, 2003. "Why Have Americans Become More Obese?," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 17(3), pages 93-118, Summer.
    5. Indra de Soysa & Ann Kristin de Soysa, 2018. "Do Globalization and Free Markets Drive Obesity among Children and Youth? An Empirical Analysis, 1990–2013," International Interactions, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 44(1), pages 88-106, January.
    6. Abadie, Alberto & Diamond, Alexis & Hainmueller, Jens, 2010. "Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 105(490), pages 493-505.
    7. Dragan Miljkovic & Saleem Shaik & Silvia Miranda & Nikita Barabanov & Anais Liogier, 2015. "Globalisation and Obesity," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(8), pages 1278-1294, August.
    8. Courtemanche, Charles & Carden, Art, 2011. "Supersizing supercenters? The impact of Walmart Supercenters on body mass index and obesity," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(2), pages 165-181, March.
    9. Goryakin, Yevgeniy & Lobstein, Tim & James, W. Philip T. & Suhrcke, Marc, 2015. "The impact of economic, political and social globalization on overweight and obesity in the 56 low and middle income countries," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 67-76.
    10. Costa-Font, Joan & Mas, Núria, 2016. "‘Globesity’? The effects of globalization on obesity and caloric intake," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 64(C), pages 121-132.
    11. Offer, Avner & Pechey, Rachel & Ulijaszek, Stanley, 2010. "Obesity under affluence varies by welfare regimes: The effect of fast food, insecurity, and inequality," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 297-308, December.
    12. repec:wly:soecon:v:82:4:y:2016:p:1266-1310 is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Offer, Avner & Pechey, Rachel & Ulijaszek, Stanley, 2010. "Obesity under affluence varies by welfare regimes: The effect of fast food, insecurity, and inequality," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 297-308, December.
    14. Barlow, Pepita & McKee, Martin & Basu, Sanjay & Stuckler, David, 2017. "Impact of the North American free trade agreement on high-fructose corn syrup supply in Canada: a natural experiment using synthetic control methods," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 102665, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cáceres Bustamante, Javiera & López Giral, Dorotea & Muñoz Navia, Felipe, 2022. "The Chile-Republic of Korea Free Trade Agreement: a synthetic control assessment," Revista CEPAL, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), December.
    2. Gilbert, Rachel & Costlow, Leah & Matteson, Julia & Rauschendorfer, Jakob & Krivonos, Ekaterina & Block, Steven A. & Masters, William A., 2024. "Trade policy reform, retail food prices and access to healthy diets worldwide," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 177(C).
    3. Adu, Derick T. & Li, Wenying & Sawadgo, Wendiam P.M., 2023. "Estimating the unintended impact of the North American free trade agreement on U.S. public health," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 333(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Giuntella, Osea & Rieger, Matthias & Rotunno, Lorenzo, 2020. "Weight gains from trade in foods: Evidence from Mexico," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 122(C).
    2. Baggio, Michele & Chong, Alberto, 2020. "Recreational marijuana laws and junk food consumption," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 39(C).
    3. Duncan, Roberto & Toledo, Patricia, 2019. "Inequality in body mass indices across countries: Evidence from convergence tests," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 40-57.
    4. Bidisha Lahiri & Anurag Deb, 2022. "Impact of the Indian “demonetization” policy on its export performance," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 62(6), pages 2799-2825, June.
    5. Sadeghi, Ali & Kibler, Ewald, 2022. "Do bankruptcy laws matter for entrepreneurship? A Synthetic Control Method analysis of a bankruptcy reform in Finland," Journal of Business Venturing Insights, Elsevier, vol. 18(C).
    6. Gonzalez, Felipe & Prem, Mounu, 2020. "Police Repression and Protest Behavior: Evidence from Student Protests in Chile," SocArXiv 3xk5r, Center for Open Science.
    7. Dennis Shen & Peng Ding & Jasjeet Sekhon & Bin Yu, 2022. "Same Root Different Leaves: Time Series and Cross-Sectional Methods in Panel Data," Papers 2207.14481, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2022.
    8. Di, Wenhua & Pattison, Nathaniel, 2023. "Industry Specialization and Small Business Lending," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 149(C).
    9. Pekka Malo & Juha Eskelinen & Xun Zhou & Timo Kuosmanen, 2024. "Computing Synthetic Controls Using Bilevel Optimization," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 64(2), pages 1113-1136, August.
    10. Robert Messerle & Jonas Schreyögg, 2024. "Country-level effects of diagnosis-related groups: evidence from Germany’s comprehensive reform of hospital payments," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 25(6), pages 1013-1030, August.
    11. Cummins Joseph & Miller Douglas L. & Smith Brock & Simon David, 2024. "Matching on Noise: Finite Sample Bias in the Synthetic Control Estimator," Journal of Econometric Methods, De Gruyter, vol. 13(1), pages 67-95, January.
    12. Jason Poulos & Andrea Albanese & Andrea Mercatanti & Fan Li, 2021. "Retrospective causal inference via matrix completion, with an evaluation of the effect of European integration on cross-border employment," Papers 2106.00788, arXiv.org.
    13. Currie, Phillippa & Smith, Trenton G. & Stillman, Steven, 2014. "Is Job Insecurity Making Australians Fat? Evidence from Panel Data on Perceived Risk of Job Loss," 2014 Annual Meeting, July 27-29, 2014, Minneapolis, Minnesota 170720, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    14. Qian Chen & Christoffer Koch & Padma Sharma & Gary Richardson, 2020. "Payments Crises and Consequences," NBER Working Papers 27733, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Stefano, Roberta di & Mellace, Giovanni, 2020. "The inclusive synthetic control method," Discussion Papers on Economics 14/2020, University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics.
    16. Sandro Heiniger, 2024. "Data-driven model selection within the matrix completion method for causal panel data models," Papers 2402.01069, arXiv.org.
    17. Augusto Cerqua & Roberta Di Stefano & Guido Pellegrini, 2023. "What kind of region reaps the benefits of a currency union?," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 63(3), pages 552-582, June.
    18. Lisa Oberlander & Anne‐Célia Disdier & Fabrice Etilé, 2017. "Globalisation and national trends in nutrition and health: A grouped fixed‐effects approach to intercountry heterogeneity," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 26(9), pages 1146-1161, September.
    19. David Gilchrist & Thomas Emery & Nuno Garoupa & Rok Spruk, 2023. "Synthetic Control Method: A tool for comparative case studies in economic history," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(2), pages 409-445, April.
    20. Marianne BLÉHAUT & Xavier D'HAULTFOEUILLE & Jérémy L'HOUR & Alexandre B. TSYBAKOV, 2020. "An alternative to synthetic control for models with many covariates under sparsity," Working Papers 2020-17, Center for Research in Economics and Statistics.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ays:ispwps:paper1914. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Paul Benson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ispgsus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.