An Empirical Investigation of Obesity & Income and Education

Rising trends in obesity epidemic have become a serious issue for states and policymakers. Earlier studies in the medical literature have discussed the impacts of income and education levels on obesity prevalence to detect the importance of socioeconomic patterns. Recently, in the economic literature, there are studies that investigate poverty-obesity paradox. In this study, using a cross-sectional data set covering 31 countries from Eurostat for 2014, we estimate the effects of income and education levels on obesity prevalence among different age groups and countries of origin. Our results show that increasing education and income have a significant and negative influence on obesity prevalence. In addition, we found that obesity is less likely to occur in countries with higher social welfare spending.