Question

How is the constant dependence on their previous or current respective metropolises affecting current political-economic deployment? Is there hope for a change in the near future? Elaborate your answer with current data/facts.

Answer 1

Anecdotal and descriptive evidence has led to the claim that globalization plays a major role in inducing overweight and obesity in developing countries, but robust quantitative evidence is scarce. We undertook extensive econometric analyses of several datasets, using a series of new proxies for different dimensions of globalization potentially affecting overweight in up to 887,000 women aged 15–49 living in 56 countries between 1991 and 2009. After controlling for relevant individual and country level factors, globalization as a whole is substantially and significantly associated with an increase in the individual propensity to be overweight among women. Surprisingly, political and social globalization dominate the influence of the economic dimension. Hence, more consideration needs to be given to the forms of governance required to shape a more health-oriented globalization process.

Globalization is our independent variable of primary interest. We seek to capture both the influence of globalization as a whole as well as its relevant sub-components: economic, social and political globalization dimensions.

• 1)Total globalization is measured using the KOF total globalization indicator (Dreher, 2006), which is an aggregation of three sub-components, described below.

• 2)Economic globalization: Our primary measure of economic globalization is the relevant KOF sub-index, which is a composite measure comprising the following variables: trade (in percent of GDP); foreign direct investment (FDI) stocks (in percent of GDP), portfolio investment (in percent of GDP), income payments to foreign nationals (in percent of GDP), hidden import barriers, mean tariff rate, taxes on international trade (in percent of current revenue) and capital account restrictions.

• 3)Political globalization: We take advantage of the political KOF index mentioned above, which is a composite measure including information on the following four components: number of foreign embassies in a given country; membership in International Organizations; participation in U.N. Security Council missions; number of signed international treaties (Dreher et al., 2008a). This component is designed to measure the degree of a country's international political engagement (Dreher, 2006). It was used, for instance, in studies examining the influence of globalization on partisan politics (Potrafke, 2009) and government expenditure patterns (Dreher et al., 2008b).

• 4)Social globalization: Our main measure of this type of globalization is the social KOF globalization index, which is based on the following variables: telephone traffic transfers (percent of GDP); international tourism foreign population (in percent of total population); international letters (per capita); internet users (per 1000 people); TVs (per 1000 people); trade in newspapers (percent of GDP); number of McDonald's restaurants (per capita); number of Ikea (per capita); trade in books (percent of GDP).

Next, we consider the association between overweight and all globalization indices taken together. One potential disadvantage of this approach is some collinearity between different sub-components (especially between social and economic dimensions, as shown in Table 2). On the other hand, putting these scores together in the same model may help ensure an additional degree of control for residual confounding. As the results in column 10 of Table 3 reveal, this approach turns the negative association between economic globalization and overweight into a more pronounced one, while making little difference for the political and social components.

These conclusions have two implications. First, more research is needed to understand the ways in which social and political globalization – as well as economic – influence overweight. The composite elements within the globalization indices could be examined to identify those which are most closely related to overweight risk. For example, it would be useful to know if the increase in McDonald's outlets, an arguably more direct index of the availability of energy dense diets, is more closely associated with the development of overweight than the increase in IKEA outlets, and if the former retains its association after controlling for the latter. Similarly, what are the key political factors – are they related to market freedoms or to democratic expression or to the adoption of current Western political attitudes – and how do these interact with economic and cultural/social factors? Open societies and cultural globalization go hand in hand with open markets and open media, with rapid penetration of advertising and brand promotion by global corporations, together with the depiction of supposedly desirable Western lifestyles which in turn help create a merging of food environments and food cultures as globalization progresses.

Secondly, with greater clarity about the key aspects of globalization becoming available, the challenge to public health policy becomes better focused.