Label, nudge or tax? A review of health policies for risky behaviours

Contribution of waste management to a sustainable textile sector

With increasing textile consumption and limited sorting and recycling capacities, the EU faces major challenges in terms of managing its textile waste. This study investigates the environmental and socio-economic impacts of explorative policy scenarios for a more sustainable textile waste management system in Europe. These scenarios differ substantially in the amounts of textile waste generated and separately collected, closed-loop recycling capacities and textile waste exports. Our results show that sustainable textile waste management remains highly relevant for the sector. Still, without addressing in parallel prevention of textile waste generation via production and consumption patterns, a climate-neutral and circular textiles sector will be hard to achieve. Interventions in the waste management of textiles could reduce global warming impacts by up to 22.3 Mt CO2 per year, which translates to an 18% sector-wide impact by 2035. Depending on the intervention(s), the estimated required investment at present amounts to between 7 and 33 billion EUR. The study provides a valuable starting point for evidence-based decisions on future textile policymaking in Europe.

The role of taxation measures in the management of harmful products, services, and practices in Iran: a qualitative study

BACKGROUND AND AIM

Levying a tax on harmful products, services, and practices can affect consumer choices, effectively preventing diseases and reducing health care costs. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of taxation as a powerful financial tool in the management of harmful products, services, and practices to maintain and improve public health and preserve the financial sustainability of the health care system.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

This qualitative study was conducted in 2020-2021. In order to collect information for this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted. Using purposive and snowball sampling methods, 38 managers, policymakers, economists, and key experts were interviewed. Data were analyzed using the content analysis method. The transcribed interviews were further imported into MAXQDA for classification, and relevant codes were extracted.

FINDINGS

In this study, 6 main themes and 19 subthemes were labeled. The main themes included 1) objectives, effects, and requirements of the taxation of harmful products, services, and practices, 2) definition, instances, elasticity, and grading of harmful products, services, and practices, 3) Problems in controlling harmful products, services, and practices, 4) controlling harmful products, services, and practices, 5) traffic violations and accidents, and social harms, and 6) tax revenue use and the share of health care. The effects of taxing harmful products include reduced access to these products, reduced demand for harmful products, and the promotion of public health.

CONCLUSION

Harmful products, services, and practices have major health and financial implications for individuals, families, and society. To improve public health, the demand for these products and services can be controlled through taxation measures to push consumers toward less harmful alternatives.

An (un)healthy social dilemma: a normative messaging field experiment with flu vaccinations

BACKGROUND

Influenza seasons can be unpredictable and have the potential to rapidly affect populations, especially in crowded areas. Prior research suggests that normative messaging can be used to increase voluntary provision of public goods, such as the influenza vaccine. We extend the literature by examining the influence of normative messaging on the decision to get vaccinated against influenza.

METHODS

We conduct a field experiment in conjunction with University Health Services, targeting undergraduate students living on campus. We use four posters, randomized by living area clusters to advertise flu vaccination clinics during the Fall. The wording on the posters is varied to emphasize the individual benefits of the vaccine, the social benefits of the vaccine or both benefits together. We collect survey data for those vaccinated at the vaccination clinics, and for those not vaccinated via an online survey.

RESULTS

We find that any normative message increases the percentage of students getting the flu vaccine compared with no message. In terms of the likelihood of getting the flu vaccine, emphasizing both the individual and social benefits of vaccination has the largest increase in the vaccination rate (19-20 percentage point increase). However, flu vaccinations did not reach the herd immunity threshold (70% of students vaccinated).

CONCLUSIONS

This study provides evidence that there is a pro-social component that is relevant in individual vaccination decisions which should be accounted for when designing vaccination campaigns. The results of this normative, pro-social messaging experiment could be extended to other at-risk communities where the number of background risks is much larger. This is especially relevant nowadays, as other seasonal vaccines are being rolled out and younger adults are the ones with the lowest uptake.

Discounting Behavior in Problem Gambling

Problem gamblers discount delayed rewards more rapidly than do non-gambling controls. Understanding this impulsivity is important for developing treatment options. In this article, we seek to make two contributions: First, we ask which of the currently debated economic models of intertemporal choice (exponential versus hyperbolic versus quasi-hyperbolic) provides the best description of gamblers' discounting behavior. Second, we ask how problem gamblers differ from habitual gamblers and non-gambling controls within the most favored parametrization. Our analysis reveals that the quasi-hyperbolic discounting model is strongly favored over the other two parametrizations. Within the quasi-hyperbolic discounting model, problem gamblers have both a significantly stronger present bias and a smaller long-run discount factor, which suggests that gamblers' impulsivity has two distinct sources.

Behavioral Economics: A Primer and Applications to the UN Sustainable Development Goal of Good Health and Well-Being

Behavioral economics (BE) is a relatively new field within economics that incorporates insights from psychology that can be harnessed to improve economic decision making with the potential to enhance good health and well-being of individuals and societies, the third of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. While some of the psychological principles of economic decision making were described as far back as the 1700s by Adam Smith, BE emerged as a discipline in the 1970s with the groundbreaking work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. We describe the basic concepts of BE, heuristics (decision-making shortcuts) and their associated biases, and the BE strategies framing, incentives, and economic nudging to overcome these biases. We survey the literature to identify how BE techniques have been employed to improve individual choice (focusing on childhood obesity), health policy, and patient and healthcare provider decision making. Additionally, we discuss how these BE-based efforts to improve health-related decision making can lead to sustaining good health and well-being and identify additional health-related areas that may benefit from including principles of BE in decision making.

A genome-wide multiphenotypic association analysis identified candidate genes and gene ontology shared by four common risky behaviors

BACKGROUND

Risky behaviors can lead to huge economic and health losses. However, limited efforts are paid to explore the genetic mechanisms of risky behaviors.

RESULT

MASH analysis identified a group of target genes for risky behaviors, such as APBB2, MAPT and DCC. For GO enrichment analysis, FUMA detected multiple risky behaviors related GO terms and brain related diseases, such as regulation of neuron differentiation (adjusted P value = 2.84×10^-5), autism spectrum disorder (adjusted P value =1.81×10^-27) and intelligence (adjusted P value =5.89×10^-15).

CONCLUSION

We reported multiple candidate genes and GO terms shared by the four risky behaviors, providing novel clues for understanding the genetic mechanism of risky behaviors.

METHODS

Multivariate Adaptive Shrinkage (MASH) analysis was first applied to the GWAS data of four specific risky behaviors (automobile speeding, drinks per week, ever-smoker, number of sexual partners) to detect the common genetic variants shared by the four risky behaviors. Utilizing genomic functional annotation data of SNPs, the SNPs detected by MASH were then mapped to target genes. Finally, gene set enrichment analysis of the identified candidate genes were conducted by the FUMA platform to obtain risky behaviors related gene ontology (GO) terms as well as diseases and traits, respectively.

Increasing breast-cancer screening uptake: A randomized controlled experiment

Early screening increases the likelihood of detecting cancer, thereby improving survival rates. National screening programs have been established in which eligible women receive a letter containing a voucher for a free screening. Even so, mammography use is often considered as remaining too low. We test four behavioral interventions in a large-scale randomized experiment involving 26,495 women. Our main assumption is that, due to biases in decision-making, women may be sensitive to the content and presentation of the invitation letter they receive. None of our treatments had any significant impact on mammography use. Sub-sample analysis suggests that this lack of a significant impact holds also for women invited for the first time and low-income women.

The effects of policy actions to improve population dietary patterns and prevent diet-related non-communicable diseases: scoping review

Poor diet generates a bigger non-communicable disease (NCD) burden than tobacco, alcohol and physical inactivity combined. We reviewed the potential effectiveness of policy actions to improve healthy food consumption and thus prevent NCDs. This scoping review focused on systematic and non-systematic reviews and categorised data using a seven-part framework: price, promotion, provision, composition, labelling, supply chain, trade/investment and multi-component interventions. We screened 1805 candidate publications and included 58 systematic and non-systematic reviews. Multi-component and price interventions appeared consistently powerful in improving healthy eating. Reformulation to reduce industrial trans fat intake also seemed very effective. Evidence on food supply chain, trade and investment studies was limited and merits further research. Food labelling and restrictions on provision or marketing of unhealthy foods were generally less effective with uncertain sustainability. Increasingly strong evidence is highlighting potentially powerful policies to improve diet and thus prevent NCDs, notably multi-component interventions, taxes, subsidies, elimination and perhaps trade agreements. The implications for policy makers are becoming clearer.

How Growing Complexity of Consumer Choices and Drivers of Consumption Behaviour Affect Demand for Animal Source Foods

Many societies are spoiled for choice when they purchase meat and other livestock products, and around the globe food choice has grown dramatically in the last two decades. What is more, besides the cost and obvious health concerns influencing commodity section, an increasing proportion of choices is made to contribute to the achievement of certain ideals, such as natural resource management, climate change mitigation, animal welfare concerns and personal lifestyle. At the same time, human health considerations are becoming more important for consumption choices as richer societies, and increasingly the urban poor in low- and middle-income countries, face an unprecedented epidemic of over-consumption and associated diet-related non-communicable diseases. Animal source foods are considered significant contributors to this trend. This paper reviews this complicated arena, and explores the range of considerations that influence consumers' preferences for meat and other animal source foods. This paper also argues that deeper drivers of consumption behaviour of many foods may act in opposition to the articulated preferences for choices around animal source food consumption. We review how the returns to different causes are being valued, how emerging metrics are helping to manage and influence consumption behaviours, and draw conclusions regarding options which influence food choice.