Food, Economics, and Health

Drawing on the author's extensive and varied research, this book provides readers with a firm grounding in the concepts and issues across several disciplines including economics, nutrition, psychology and public health in the hope of improving the design of food policies in the developed and developing world. Using longitudinal (panel) data from India, Bangladesh, Kenya, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Pakistan and extending the analytical framework used in economics and biomedical sciences to include multi-disciplinary analyses, Alok Bhargava shows how rigorous and thoughtful econometric and statistical analysis can improve our understanding of the relationships between a number of socioeconomic, nutritional, and behavioural variables on a number of issues like cognitive development in children and labour productivity in the developing world. These unique insights combined with a multi-disciplinary approach forge the way for a more refined and effective approach to food policy formation going forward. A chapter on the growing obesity epidemic is also included, highlighting the new set of problems facing not only developed but developing countries. The book also includes a glossary of technical terms to assist readers coming from a variety of disciplines. "Alok Bhargava can always be expected to write important papers and texts on major topics concerning how real people live (or not) and the quality of their lives using advanced arguments from economics and based on skilled use of econometric methodology. Here he tackles the vital interaction between economics with health, food consumption, and economics tangled up with questions about attitudes to poverty and gender. This is a rich and difficult field and quickly leads to questions about the objectives of a society and the various difficult choices about how best to target resources. It should be remembered that countless intellectual giants from the past, such as Newton, Galileo, and Shakespeare, lived and succeeded whilst living in conditions that would now be considered as deplorable. Economics and scientific discovery can take us some way towards making rational decisions but one probably needs philosophy and sound politics to reach the best outcomes. Alok has written an excellent book which requires careful thought and introspection to get to all of its important topics." Clive Granger, 2003 Nobel Prize for Economics Laureate