Key findings on alcohol consumption and a variety of health outcomes from the nurses’ health study

From the American Journal of Public Health, Volume 106, Issue 9 (September 2016): Key Findings on Alcohol Consumption and a Variety of Health Outcomes From the Nurses’ Health Study by Elizabeth Mostofsky, Kenneth J. Mukamal, Ed L. Giovannucci, Meir J. Stampfer, and Eric B. Rimm.

Conclusions. Regular alcohol intake has both risks and benefits. In analyses using repeated assessments of alcohol over time and deaths from all causes, women with low to moderate intake and regular frequency (>3 days/week) had the lowest risk of mortality compared with abstainers and women who consumed substantially more than 1 drink per day. (Am J Public Health.2016;106:1586–1591. doi:10.2105/ AJPH.2016.303336)

Why is Fat Bastard fat?

Apart from the obvious point that Mike Myers created the character that way.

In a recent column at VoxEU.org Rachel Griffith and Melanie Lührmann argue that its because he doesn't exercise as much we used to.

Griffith and Lührmann start by arguing that the rise in obesity we see around the world has largely been attributed to an increase in calorie consumption. They then set out to investigate this claim by examining the evolving consumption and lifestyles of English households over the 30 year period between 1980 and 2013. While there has been an increase in calories from restaurants, fast food, soft drinks, and confectionery, there has been an overall decrease in total calories purchased. This decline in calories can be partially rationalised with weight gain by the decline in the strenuousness of work and daily life, and increasingly sedentary lifestyles.

Overall, we see that declines in physical activity at market work and in other activities has largely counteracted the reduction in calories. As well as going some way toward explaining the rise in obesity, our research indicates that market work might also influence the types of foods we eat. Households that spend more time in market work buy more market-produced foods. They eat more often in restaurants and fast food outlets, and eat more takeaway. Market-produced foods are on the whole more expensive than home-produced foods, and this means that trends in expenditure do not necessarily mirror trends in calories.

So its not that we consume more calories, its more that we don't use up as many calories as we used to. Thus its not so much that Fat Bastard is tucking into more haggis, its more that he not chasing and cubing as many Englishmen as he used to.

Latest New Zealand Economics Papers

There are actually a few interesting looking papers in the latest issue of NZEP:

Does stadium construction create jobs and boost incomes? The realised economic impacts of sports facilities in New Zealand

by Samuel A. Richardson

Government involvement in facility construction is typically justified on the basis of ex-ante predictions of economic impact resulting from events hosted at the new or upgraded facility. This paper examines the impact of facility construction on construction sector employment and real GDP across 15 New Zealand cities between 1997 and 2009. Results from static and dynamic models indicate that certain types of facilities had short-term (during construction) positive impacts on construction sector employment growth, although only stadium projects generated positive post-construction employment impacts. There is also little in the way of empirical evidence to suggest that new or upgraded facilities had any significant impact on local area real GDP either during or post-construction.

The effects of home heating on asthma: evidence from New Zealand

by Andrea Kutinova Menclova and Rachel Susan Webb

New Zealand, along with the USA and Australia, has one of the highest asthma rates among developed countries and previous analyses attribute this partly to insufficient home heating in certain neighbourhoods. International public health and medical studies corroborate this link but strong evidence of causality is lacking. In this paper, we empirically investigate the effect of home heating on hospital asthma admissions using panel data techniques and controlling for endogeneity. The hypothesis that higher electricity prices (via less adequate heating) increase hospital asthma admissions is tested and receives strong empirical support across a number of model specifications and datasets used.

and, of course, the truly magnificent - he says with all modesty

From complete to incomplete (contracts): A survey of the mainstream approach to the theory of privatisation

by Paul Walker

Privatisation is a common, yet controversial, policy in many countries around the world, including New Zealand. In this essay, we survey the literature on the theory of privatisation to see what insights it provides to the privatisation debate. We divide the literature into two periods defined by their relationship to the theory of the firm. In the period up to 1990, the literature followed the theory of the firm in using a complete or comprehensive contracting modelling framework. By the end of the 1980s, the ownership neutrality theorems highlighted a major weakness with this approach. The contemporary (post-1990) literature took advantage of incomplete contracting models to explain the difference in the behaviour of state and privately owned firms.

Smoking, plain packaging, and public health

A recent research report from the Adam Smith Institute reviews the evidence around plain packaging for cigarettes from Australia, the only country to have tried the policy so far. It finds that plain packaging has not had a noticeable impact on smoking rates, but has led to a significant rise in counterfeits, which are more easily available for underage smokers.

A more detailed summary of the paper's findings is.

In 2011, Australia’s government introduced legislation mandating that cigarettes be sold in “plain packages” (i.e., without brand logos and colours). The legislation came into effect in late 2012. (Australia had already banned practically all tobacco advertising and other forms of marketing. In 2006, it had introduced a requirement that cigarette packs display graphic health warnings on a substantial proportion of their surface area.)

Some studies (such as a survey carried out when plain packaging was being introduced, an analysis of calls to a smoking cessation hotline, and a survey of outdoor smoking habits) suggest that plain packaging has indeed, made cigarettes less desirable to smokers and has increased thoughts of quitting.

However, an online survey of smokers carried out in two phases, the first a month before and the second six to eight weeks after the introduction of the plain packaging rules, suggest that the impact of the rules on quitting tendencies is probably small. Moreover, many smokers engaged in defensive behaviors such as covering up health warnings, and did not report changing brands or a significant increased tendency to quit. This finding was corroborated by another survey that found that in the year to July 2013 the proportion of smokers in Australia had not declined since the introduction of plain packaging.

A study looking at discarded packs and other data suggests that consumption of cigarettes in the year to July 2013 remained at the same level as in 2012, but found that the proportion of illicit cigarettes had increased substantially. This is corroborated by the most recent Annual Report of Australia’s Customs and Border Protection Service, which indicates that the number of illicit cigarettes entering Australia has indeed risen dramatically in the past three years.

The discarded pack study concluded that contraband—much of which is in the form of finished cigarettes that are not legally sold anywhere in the world, known as “illicit whites”—now accounts for more than half of illegal sales and about 7.5% of all sales. Part of the blame for the increased availability of illicit whites lies with a 25% increase in excise tax on tobacco introduced in 2010. But, since most of the increase in their market share occurred in the past 18 months, part of the blame almost certainly rests with the plain packaging rules.

The wide availability of illicit whites in Australia means it is highly likely that adolescents now have greater access to cigarettes than previously—and at lower prices. Moreover, these “illicit whites” have no health warnings. Given the contribution of plain packaging in Australia to the rise of the illicit white, it seems reasonable to conclude that it has been counterproductive.

So another case of health advocates harts being in the rights place, but you have to wonder where their brains are?