Suchergebnisse

OBJECTIVES: Chronic disease accounts for 70% of deaths globally and causes substantial economic burdens. Research indicates diet can significantly reduce the risk of many chronic diseases. Governments regulate health claims that can inform consumers of foods' health attributes and encourage them to consume healthy diets. This paper evaluates how the health status of North Americans has changed over time and after the approval of health claims in Canada and the United States. METHODS: Data were obtained from the OECD Health Statistics database. A logarithmic health status function with country fixed-effects for Canada and the USA is used to evaluate changes in life expectancies over time. RESULTS: The findings indicate the health claims significantly affected female but not male life expectancies. However, both female (0.303%/year) and male (0.611%/year) life expectancies improved over the period, suggesting they are responsive to external health information. CONCLUSION: This paper provides insights and discusses policy options regarding the efficacy of specific health claims in Canada and the USA at nudging consumers to improve health outcomes.

This paper uses Johansen's co-integration analysis and a vector error-correction model to investigate the relationship between economic growth, export growth, export instability and gross fixed capital formation (investment) in India during the period 1971- 2005. The empirical results suggest that there exists a unique long-run relationship among these variables and the Granger causal flow is unidirectional from real exports to real GDP. For example, ceteris paribus, a 1% increase in exports raises GDP by an estimated 0.42% in the long run. The short term dynamic behavior of income growth function was investigated by estimating an error correction model in which the error correction term was found to be correctly signed and statistically significant. The policy implication is that government should continue to pursue export oriented measures if India is to secure greater levels of income and more rapid and sustained economic growth in the coming years.