The 'Heart Kuznets Curve'? Understanding the relations between economic development and cardiac conditions

Examining obesity kuznets curve in the United States from the perspective of globalization and biocapacity

Given the recent rise in the adult obesity prevalence in the United States, the central and state-level governments and health agencies in the country are considering appropriate measures. Further motivation for this investigation stems from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG-3, 8, and 13), that highlights the need for sustainable health for all, sustainable decent economic growth amidst environmental sustainability. Driven by this motivation, this study investigates the validity of Obesity Kuznets curve (OKC) in the United States over the experimental period of 1975-2016. In addition, this study illustrates the (mediating) role of globalisation and biocapacity in controlling the prevalence of obesity in the United States. While the study established the validity of obesity Kuznets curve, especially in the short run, it found an inverted U-shaped relationship between globalisation and obesity for the United States. This interprets that a significant reduction in wealth-related health issues is achievable with increased (socioeconomic and political) globalisation policy amidst improved (socioeconomic) welfare of the Americans. Moreover, biocapacity showed a desirable impact on obesity since the short- and long-run relationship with a respective elasticity of 0.02 and 1.86 is negative and statistically significant. In general, this study puts forward policy from the perspective of socioeconomic and political globalisation and domestic welfare measures across the country.

Is Economic Growth Good for Population Health? A Critical Review

A large multidisciplinary literature discusses the relationship between economic growth and population health. The idea that economic growth is good for societies has inspired extensive academic debate, but conclusions have been mixed. To help shed light on the subject, this paper focuses on opportunities for consensus in this large literature. Much scholarship finds that the health-growth relationship varies according to (1) which aspect of "health" is under consideration, (2) shape (e.g., positive linear or logarithmic), (3) issues of timing (e.g., growth over the short or long term), (4) a focus on health inequalities as opposed to population averages, and (5) multivariable relationships with additional factors. After reflecting upon these findings, I propose that economic growth promotes health in some respects, for some countries, and in conjunction with other life-supporting priorities, but does not by itself improve population health generally speaking. I then argue there is already wide, interdisciplinary consensus to support this stance. Moreover, policies focusing exclusively on economic growth threaten harm to both population health and growth, which is to say that political dynamics are also implicated. Yet multivariable approaches can help clarify the bigger picture of how growth relates to health. For moving this literature forward, the best opportunities may involve the simultaneous analysis of multiple factors. The recognition of consensus around these issues would be welcome, and timely.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42650-023-00072-y.

Correlates of the country differences in the infection and mortality rates during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from Bayesian model averaging

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in great discrepancies in both infection and mortality rates between countries. Besides the biological and epidemiological factors, a multitude of social and economic criteria also influenced the extent to which these discrepancies appeared. Consequently, there is an active debate regarding the critical socio-economic and health factors that correlate with the infection and mortality rates outcome of the pandemic. Here, we leverage Bayesian model averaging techniques and country level data to investigate whether 28 variables, which describe a diverse set of health and socio-economic characteristics, correlate with the final number of infections and deaths during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. We show that only a few variables are able to robustly correlate with these outcomes. To understand the relationship between the potential correlates in explaining the infection and death rates, we create a Jointness Space. Using this space, we conclude that the extent to which each variable is able to provide a credible explanation for the COVID-19 infections/mortality outcome varies between countries because of their heterogeneous features.

Do news media and citizens have the same agenda on COVID-19? an empirical comparison of twitter posts

This study analyses the agenda setting on social media in the COVID-19 pandemic by exploiting one of the disruptive technologies, big data analytics. Our purpose is to examine whether the agenda of news organisations matches the public agenda on social media in crisis situations, and to explore the feasibility and efficacy of applying big data analytics on social media data. To this end, we used an unsupervised machine learning approach, structural topic modelling and analysed 129,965 tweets posted by UK news media and citizens during April 2, and 8, 2020. Our study reveals a wide diversity of topics in the tweets generated by both groups and finds only a small number of topics are similar, indicating different agendas set in the pandemic. Moreover, we show that citizen tweets focused more on expressing feelings and sharing personal activities while news media tweets talked more about facts and analysis on COVID-19. In addition, our results find that citizens responded more significantly to breaking news. The findings of the study contribute to the agenda setting literature and offer valuable practical implications.

Relationships between social spending and childhood obesity in OECD countries: an ecological study

OBJECTIVES

The burden of childhood obesity is clustered among children in low-socioeconomic groups. Social spending on children-public welfare expenditure on families and education-may curb childhood obesity by reducing socioeconomic disadvantages. The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between social spending on children and childhood obesity across the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

DESIGN

Ecological study.

SETTING

Data on social spending on children were obtained from the OECD Social Expenditure Database and the OECD educational finance indicators dataset during 2000-2015. Data on childhood obesity were obtained from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration database.

PARTICIPANTS

Aggregated statistics on obesity among children aged 5-19 years, estimated for OECD 35 countries based on the measured height and weight on 31.5 million children.

OUTCOME MEASURES

Country-level prevalence of obesity among children aged 5-19 years.

RESULTS

In cross-sectional analyses in 2015, social spending on children was inversely associated with the prevalence of childhood obesity after adjusting for potential confounders (the gross domestic product per capita, unemployment rate, poverty rate, percentage of children aged <20 years and prevalence of childhood obesity in 2000). In addition, when we focused on changes from 2000 to 2015, an average annual increase of US$100 in social spending per child was associated with a decrease in childhood obesity by 0.6 percentage points for girls (p=0.007) and 0.7 percentage points for boys (p=0.04) between 2000 and 2015, after adjusting for the potential confounders. The dimensions of social spending that contributed to these associations between the changes in social spending on children and childhood obesity were early childhood education and care (ECEC) and school education for girls and ECEC for boys.

CONCLUSION

Countries that increase social spending on children tend to experience smaller increases in childhood obesity.

A Bibliometric Analysis of Corona Pandemic in Social Sciences: A Review of Influential Aspects and Conceptual Structure

Corona pandemic has affected the whole world, and it is a highly researched area in biological sciences. As the current pandemic has affected countries socially and economically, the purpose of this bibliometric analysis is to provide a holistic review of the corona pandemic in the field of social sciences. This study aims to highlight significant, influential aspects, research streams, and themes. We have reviewed 395 journal articles related to coronavirus in the field of social sciences from 2003 to 2020. We have deployed 'biblioshiny' a web-interface of the 'bibliometrix 3.0' package of R-studio to conduct bibliometric analysis and visualization. In the field of social sciences, we have reported influential aspects of coronavirus literature. We have found that the 'Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report' is the top journal. The core article of coronavirus literature is 'Guidelines for preventing health-care-associated pneumonia'. The most commonly used word, in titles, abstracts, author's keywords, and keywords plus, is 'SARS'. Top affiliation is 'The University of Hong Kong'. Hong Kong is a leading country based on citations, and the USA is on top based on total publications. We have used a conceptual framework to identify potential research streams and themes in coronavirus literature. Four research streams are found by deploying a co-occurrence network. These research streams are 'Social and economic effects of epidemic disease', 'Infectious disease calamities and control', 'Outbreak of COVID 19,' and 'Infectious diseases and the role of international organizations'. Finally, a thematic map is used to provide a holistic understanding by dividing significant themes into basic or transversal, emerging or declining, motor, highly developed, but isolated themes. These themes and subthemes have proposed future directions and critical areas of research.