Globalization and obesity in the GCC countries

ABSTRACT

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have some of the highest obesity rates in the world. At the same time, the GCC countries have become increasingly integrated in the global economy as they attempt to diversify their economies. This raises the question whether rapid development and globalization contribute to obesity in these countries. To deal with the existing autocorrelation in the error term and the endogeneity problem, a dynamic panel econometric model is used to estimate the effect of globalization in its various dimensions on obesity in the GCC countries. This study finds evidence for positive and significant effect of social and economic globalization on obesity rates in the GCC countries relative to the rest of the world. The results suggest that (rapid) globalization can lead to higher obesity rates in emerging economies. Hence, policy has an important role to play to cushion the impact of globalization on health and nutrition.

KEYWORDS:

• Globalization
• obesity
• GCC countries
• nutrition transition

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F6
• I15
• O1

Acknowledgements

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

Data availability statement

The ‘obesity’ data that support the findings of this study are available from the World Health Organization (WHO) (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight). The ‘KOF Globalization Index’ data are available from ‘KOF Swiss Economic Institute’ (https://kof.ethz.ch/en/forecasts-and-indicators/indicators/kof-globalisation-index.html#). Data on ‘Human Development Index’ (HDI) are available from the ‘United Nations Development Programme’ (http://hdr.undp.org/en/data). Other data used in the paper are available from the ‘World Bank’ (https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a comprehensive definition of globalization, see Scholte (2008) and Dreher et al. (2008).

2 De facto social globalization covers international voice traffic, internet bandwidth use, transfers, tourism, migration, trade in cultural and personal goods, and availability of MacDonald’s restaurants and IKEA stores (see https://kof.ethz.ch/en/forecasts-and-indicators/indicators/kof-globalisation-index.html).

3 Fourteen Arab countries that include the GCC states signed the Greater Arab Free Trade Agreement (GAFTA) in 1998. The GCC customs union went into force in 2003.

4 The Arellano-Bond estimator can be deployed in STATA using the xtabond2 command.

5 The Hansen-test is favored over the Sargan test since the Sargan test is only appropriate under the assumption of homoskedasticity and no serial correlation (in levels) of the idiosyncratic error term (Roodman, 2009).

6 Refer to the website of the KOF Globalization index for the composition of all sub-indices considered (https://kof.ethz.ch/en/forecasts-and-indicators/indicators/kof-globalisation-index.html).

7 This estimation can be implemented in Stata using the xtscc command.