This paper examines the relationship of 1987 retail grocery prices to supermarket sales concentration across 95 U.S. metropolitan areas. The regression model incorporates a large number of population, retail-cost, and retail competition factors and separate prices by type of grocery item. We...

The high and rapidly rising adult obesity rates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are associated with major health risks, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and some forms of cancer; large health care costs; and premature deaths annually. For...

More than one billion adults are overweight worldwide, and more than 300 million of them clinically obese, raising the risk of many serious diseases. Only 3.6 percent of Japanese have a body mass index (BMI) over 30, which is the international standard for obesity, whereas 32.0 percent of...

This paper examines women’s and men’s decisions to participate in physical activity and to attain a healthy weight. These outcomes are hypothesized to be related to prices of food, drink and health care services and products, the respondent’s personal characteristics (such as education,...

This paper examines women’s and men’s decisions to participate in physical activity and to attain a healthy weight. These outcomes are hypothesized to be related to prices of food, drink and health care services and products, the respondent’s personal characteristics (such as education,...

Prepared for the COMESA policy seminar on“Variation in staple food prices: Causes, consequence, and policy options”,Maputo, Mozambique, 25-26 January 2010under the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Marketing Project (AAMP)

Paper to be presented at the Comesa policy seminar“Food price variability: Causes, consequences, and policy options"on 25-26 January 2010 in Maputo, Mozambiqueunder the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Markets Project (AAMP)

As much of the world goes searching for alternative sources of energy to oil, Brazil's three-decade experience in developing a successful substitute for gasoline merits attention. Brazil is the only sizable economy to date to have developed a ubiquitously distributed alternative to oil-based...

The global hunger indices of 2008 and 2009 (Grebmer et al. 2008, 2009) point to persistently high levels of hunger and food insecurity and a worsening of the situation due to rising crop prices. At the same time, there is a lack of empirical knowledge on the demand- and supply-side determinants...

We examine the effects that variations in the international food prices have on democracy and intra-state conflict using panel data for over 120 countries during the period 1970-2007. Our main finding is that in Low Income Countries increases in the international food prices lead to a...