Does social globalisation through access to information communication technologies drive obesity among youth? An empirical analysis, 1990–2013

ABSTRACT

Scholars debate the effects of globalisation on obesity. Using the latest data on access to ICTs and the Global Burden of Disease data on excess weight gain and obesity, we find that both social globalisation and access to ICTs lower the overweight and obese share among the global youth cohort aged 15–19. Previous studies report mixed results, which are hard to evaluate because of the use of different data, sample sizes, and estimating strategies. Using fixed-effects analyses on a global sample of over 160 countries spanning 24 years, we show that ‘social globalization’ reduces the obesity share of youth when fixed effects are estimated. Greater access to ICTs also independently lowers youth obesity rates. We speculate that greater access to information and knowledge about current trends, the benefits of physical activity and diet, and trends in healthy consumption spreading through ICTs might be a boon despite risks associated with greater consumption from increasing wealth and political freedoms. These results are robust to several estimating methods, including instrumental variables analysis. Our results suggest that increased access to ICTs does not increase obesity and that policy might even usefully target youth via ICTs for encouraging better health.

KEYWORDS:

• ICTs
• social globalisation
• overweight
• obesity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The data and do files used to generate the results are available for download at https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/indra.de.soysa.

2 The following make up the list of 22 ‘Western' industrialized countries: United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Austria, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.

3 We compute substantive effects by multiplying the coefficient of x by a standard deviation of the within variation of x and then dividing the product by a standard deviation of the within variation of y, expressed as a percentage.

4 We are very grateful to Thomas Andersen for sharing this data with us.