Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the associations between obesogenic severity, the public health situation, environmental impacts, and health care expenditures in populations worldwide.
Design/methodology/approach
This ecological study is based on official data available for approximately 140 countries worldwide. This study defines four main variables: obesogenic severity, environmental impact, public health implications (PHI), and health expenditures, all measured through specific indicators. Data were obtained mainly from the WHO, World Bank, and IDF. The indicators were reduced to the main variables through factorial reduction and multiple regression analyses were used to test the main hypotheses.
Findings
Obesogenic severity strongly and positively affects environmental impacts (β=0.6578; p<0.001), PHI-1 (cardiovascular risk factor) (β=0.3137; p<0.001) and PHI-2 (blood glucose and diabetes diagnoses) (β=0.3170; p<0.001). Additionally, environmental impacts strongly and positively affect PHI-1 (β=0.4978; p<0.001) but not PHI-2. Thus, results suggest that environmental impact, PHI-1, and PHI-2 strongly affect health expenditures (β=0.3154; p<0.001, β=0.5745; p<0.001, and β=−0.4843; p<0.001, respectively), with PHI-2 negatively affecting the health expenditures.
Practical implications
This study presents evidence that can aid in decision making regarding public and private efforts to better align budgets and resources as well as predict the needs and expenditures of public health care systems.
Originality/value
This investigation finds that the main variables addressed are strongly associated at the worldwide level. Thus, these analytical procedures can be used to predict public health and health care cost scenarios at the global level.
The burden of abdominal obesity with physical inactivity on health expenditure in Brazil
