The world food situation has significantly improved over the latest decades. Fears of an impending global food crisis have largely vanished. Along the last 40 years world population grew by 98% but food supply increased by 155%. Per capita food availability grew at an annual rate of about 0.5%...

It has been known for centuries that the rich and famous have longer lives than the poor and ordinary. Causality, however, remains trenchantly debated. The ideal experiment would be one in which status and money could somehow be dropped upon a sub-sample of individuals while those in a control...

Widespread hunger and malnutrition persist today despite considerable growth in per capita food availability. This has prompted an evolving conceptualization of food security and of mechanisms to attain and maintain food security. This chapter discusses both food security and food assistance...

In recent years, the increase in international trade has sparked a debate about the impact of international trade on population health. To date, however, there has been very little econometric research on the relationship between these two variables. This paper examines the long-run relationship...

We use a panel of 139 countries to examine the relationship between a country's openness to international trade and several health outcomes and find that, in general, increased openness is associated with lower rates of infant mortality and higher average life expectancies, especially in...

We investigate the relationship between household debt and health outcomes for OECD countries over the period 1995 to 2012. Using a dataset of aggregated, standardized and objective measures of household debt and health outcomes, we estimate an instrumental variable (GMM) model in order to deal...

The number of hungry in the world has crossed the one billion mark, a dubious milestone that has been attributed in large part to consecutive food and economic crises. Over ninety-eight percent of these individuals live in the developing world. Ironically, a great majority are involved in food...