The Relationship Between Income, Economic Freedom, and BMI

Originally published in Public Health

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of economic freedom on obesity conditional on the level of income and other factors.

What explains increases in BMI (and obesity) over time and across countries? Although many microeconomic forces are likely explanations, increasingly scholars are arguing that macroeconomic forces such as market liberalism and globalization are root causes of the obesity epidemic. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of economic freedom on obesity conditional on the level of income and other factors.