Skip to content

Month: November 2011

Published November 4, 2011

Food Deserts: Health Impacts and a Short Reading List

From an article in this week’s issue of The Economist:

This part of Chicago’s South Side is in the heart of one of America’s many food deserts. These are notable not for the absence of food, but for the kind of food available. Though crisps, sweets and doughnuts are easy to come by, an apple is a rare commodity. Yet all the evidence shows that poor access to quality food results in a higher risk of obesity, diabetes and cancer — and more avoidable deaths.

Although cynics might argue that the market gives people the food they deserve, research published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests otherwise. During the 1990s, when the American government paid for around 1,800 women to move out of public housing, the women who had moved showed a 20% lower rate of obesity and diabetes than those who had not. In other words, their improved environment (which many assume would include better shops) led to their better health.

Here is a link to the New England Journal of Medicine article by Ludwig et al., which relies on a randomized controlled trial. Here is the Wikipedia page discussing food deserts.

This article by Marcel Fafchamps and Ruth Vargas Hill lists many scholarly references on food deserts. In particular, I would check out those by Alcaly and Klevorick (1971), Caraher et al. (1998), Goodman (1968), Whelan et al. (2002), and Wrigley et al. (2002).

Published November 3, 2011

China in Africa

The abstract for a new working paper titled “The Contribution of Chinese FDI to Africa’s Pre-Crisis Growth Surge.” Skip to the part in bold font if you just want the punchline:

In the 3 years before the 2008 financial crisis, GDP growth in sub-Saharan Africa (averaged over individual economies) was around 6 percent, or 2 percentage points above mean growth rates for the preceding 10 years. This period also coincided with significant Chinese FDI flows into these countries, accounting for up to 10 percent of total inward FDI flows for certain countries in these years. We use growth accounting methods to assess what portion of this elevated growth can be attributed to Chinese inward FDI. We follow Solow (1957), Dennison (1962), and others and use data for individual economies between 1990 and 2008 to calculate Solow residuals for these years for individual economies. We use capital stock data, workforce, and factor share data by country. Capital stock data is unavailable directly, and so we use perpetual inventory methods to construct the data. Factor shares come from UN National Accounts data. We then run counterfactual growth accounting experiments for thirteen sub-Saharan African countries excluding Chinese FDI inflows for 2005-2007 and also 2003-2009. Our individual results vary by year and country, but there are several year/country combinations where Chinese FDI contributed to an additional one half of a percentage point or above to GDP growth. These results suggest that a significant, even if in some cases small, portion of the elevated growth in sub-Saharan Africa in the three years before the Financial Crisis and also in the two years afterwards (2008-2009) can be attributed to Chinese inward investment.

 

Published November 3, 2011

Let the Little Boys Die

A hard-hitting, must-read Global Dashboard post by David Steven in reaction to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2012’s claim that “four million girls and women ‘go missing’ each year in developing countries”:

So what’s going on? The answer is slightly hard to follow: girls are significantly less likely to die of infectious diseases than boys, but they are even less likely to die of perinatal conditions (in or just after childbirth). So while all children benefit as infectious diseases are tackled, girls benefit slightly more than boys.

In other words, there’s no discrimination in play and this section of the report is based on a statistical artefact. Or a red herring. Or a tendentious attempt to beef up a press release (and if the result implies the health of poor girls matters more than that of poor boys – well, hey ho).

My conclusion: the 4 million figure is an advocacy stat of the worst kind. Lazy in its execution. And borderline dishonest in its presentation – especially for those who read the op-ed, and fail to find the detail buried in the report.

The WDR website may be cock-a-hoop that it garnered “156 news stories published by lead print news outlets across the world, in just a week.” But I don’t think a blitz of favorable media for the Bank is what the WDR should be all about…

This post is merely a digest of David’s post, so be sure to read his post in its entirety.