Public Health Roles in Addressing Commercial Determinants of Health

The shared challenges posed by the production and distribution of health-harming products have led to growing recognition of the need for policy learning and transfer across problems, populations, and social contexts. The commercial determinants of health (CDoH) can serve as a unifying concept to describe the population health consequences arising from for-profit actors and activities, along with the social structures that sustain them. Strategies to mitigate harms from CDoH have focused on behavioral change, regulation, fiscal policies, consumer and citizen activism, and litigation. While there is evidence of effective measures for each strategy, approaches that combine strategies are generally more impactful. Filling gaps in evidence can inform ways of adapting these strategies to specific populations and social contexts. Overall, CDoH are addressed most effectively not through siloed efforts to reduce consumption of health-harming products, but instead as a set of integrated strategies to reduce exposures to health-harming commercial actors and activities. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Public Health, Volume 43 is April 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Economic Growth and Changes in Public Expenditures of the States in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Fiscal policies are changing due to the conditions required by the COVID-19 pandemic towards the new world order. Under these circumstances, developed countries use their resources for their citizens, and international financial institutions step in for underdeveloped and developing countries with insufficient public resources of their own or are in debt and offer new credit opportunities to these countries. This study aims to analyze how public expenditures, one of the important policies in economic growth and development, will change during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of the findings obtained from the literature review, the economic effects of the pandemic are explained by making a descriptive analysis of secondary data at the levels of country groups classified according to development and income level. Secondly, factors affecting the changes in the public expenditure of countries due to the pandemic were examined, and evaluations are made on the public expenditures in fiscal policies that will ensure the economic recovery and growth of countries after the pandemic.

Stock Market Responses to Monetary and Fiscal Policies

This study analyzes the short-run and long-run effects of interaction between fiscal and monetary policies on stock market performance in four emerging Asian economies, which are China, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia, by using ARDL model. The study covers the period of 2003:Q1-2020:Q1. The findings from this study show monetary and fiscal policies play an important role in determining stock market returns. Also, the results theoretically support Richardian neutrality hypothesis for China and Indonesia, Keynesian positive effect hypothesis for India, and classical crowding out effect hypothesis for Malaysia, and interest channel of monetary transmission mechanism only for China.

The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on International Stock Exchanges

It is possible to define the concept of risk in various ways. Risk is the deviation possibility of the realized value from the expected value. It has two components, nonsystematic risk and systematic risk. Despite this, pandemics are risk factors that cannot be anticipated. They have deeply affected economies and financial markets under every condition. The importance of the detection of the COVID-19 pandemic comes from the selection of monetary and fiscal policies to be applied by governments during the rehabilitation process of economies. Equity share markets provide important information regarding the future of a company or economy. The reason for this is that the current value of an equity share is dependent on the deducted calculation of the cash flows of the equity share to be provided in the future. The actual price of the equity share is determined according to supply and demand under market conditions.

Implementation of Tax Incentives to Avoid Unemployment Caused by the Economic Situation due to the COVID-19 Health Emergency in Mexico

Since the end of March 2020 millions, as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as a health emergency, working people had to stay at home, telework or had to face consequences of the crisis such as low wages or layoffs.[i] In Mexico unemployment became a major problem for the economy. Although the country took measures to contain the imp act of the pandemic on the labor market, these have not been sufficient; the development and implementation of activities that create incentive or promotions are indispensable components of the recovery or sustainability of industries in times of crisis[ii]. According to Article 25 of the Political Constitution of Mexico[iii], the State is responsible for guiding national development and ensure that it is comprehensive and sustainable; the State shall, according to the Constitutional provision, ensure the stability of public finances and the financial system to help generate favorable conditions for economic growth and employment[iv]. I shall argue however that the fiscal policies implemented to contribute as determining factors in the sector of growing unemployment due to the COVID-19 pandemic have not been adequate even though the optimal measures were being taken under a more socialist system of governance in place during the two years.

Fiscal policies to promote environmentally sustainable food production and consumption: A scoping review protocol

The objective of this scoping review is to examine food taxes and subsidies and their environmental outcomes by incorporating evidence from the peer-reviewed literature and evidence from the non-peer-reviewed or ‘grey’ literature, including policy documents/briefs, research reports, and white papers. The scoping review questions are:1. What food taxes and subsidies have been studied in the context of environmentally sustainable food production or consumption?2. What types of environmental outcomes were reported?3. At what various levels (e.g., food production-, food outlet-, consumer-level) were the policies implemented?This is the final version of the scoping review protocol, published as a preprint to create full transparency about the scoping review process.

Impact of the OMRR Operation in Fighting the Adverse Effects of COVID-19 on the Chinese Stock Market: An Event Study

The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has had an adverse effect on China's economy. This paper uses the event study method to test and measure the impact of the open market reverse repo (OMRR) operation on the Chinese stock market. The results show that the OMRR operation generates a positive daily abnormal return and a positive daily cumulative abnormal return on average for all stocks. The impact is larger for non-state-owned enterprise (non-SOE) firms than for SOE firms, stocks of non-Hubei provinces than those of the Hubei province, and for stocks of the information transmission and technology industry than those of other industries. We suggest that our government implement more prudent monetary policies and more proactive fiscal policies.

Greek GDP growth in 2022 will rely on EU recovery aid

Significance The economic rebound from a 9% contraction in 2020 is mainly being driven by strong domestic demand supported by accommodative fiscal policies and higher-than-expected tourism revenues. However, the deteriorating epidemiological situation in Greece, and new COVID-19 variants expanding into Europe -- possibly resistant to vaccines -- pose risks to future growth prospects. Impacts Persistent supply-chain disruptions will slow down expansion in industrial output in 2022. Winding down the fiscal stimulus will narrow the primary budget deficit from 7.6% of GDP in 2021 to an estimated 1.2% in 2022. The primary budget deficit will widen in 2022-23 thanks to front-loading defence spending. Greater penetration of digital services is a positive side-effect of the pandemic. A deceleration in bank credit issuance could restrict corporate investment in 2022.

Theory vs. Practice: Does Fiscal Policy Crowd Out Business Investment during Crises?

In 2020, the South Korean government aimed to mitigate the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by enacting a fiscal stimulus package worth 66.8 trillion won. Traditional economic theory warns that such deficit-financed expansionary fiscal policies can have the adverse effect of crowding out business investment, but the current literature is more divided: some argue that the crowding-out effect outweighs the multiplier effect of fiscal stimulus; some claim that the two effects cancel each other out; and others assert that the scale of crowding out is small, at least in recessions. It is important to study the existence and scale of crowding out during recessions to evaluate the soundness of fiscal policies as a countercyclical tool. Thus, this paper examines whether Korea’s fiscal policy crowded out business investment during two severe economic downturns: the “great recession” of 2008 and the “great lockdown” of 2020. The paper uses a cross-time case comparison of the two economic crises in the hopes of drawing generalizable conclusions for South Korea over time. The findings show that Korea’s facility investment continued to increase during the recent pandemic but decreased during the 2008 financial crisis. Was this due to crowding out? Further analysis suggests that the decrease in investment during the 2008 crisis was due to factors other than crowding out. Hence, the paper concludes that Korea’s fiscal responses to the two crises did not crowd out business investment and thus encourages the continued use of appropriately sized and targeted fiscal stimulus during recessions.

Developing an integrated microsimulation model for the impact of fiscal policies on child health in Europe: the example of childhood obesity in Italy

Background We developed an integrated model called Microsimulation for Income and Child Health (MICH) that provides a tool for analysing the prospective effects of fiscal policies on childhood health in European countries. The aim of this first MICH study is to evaluate the impact of alternative fiscal policies on childhood overweight and obesity in Italy. Methods MICH model is composed of three integrated modules. Firstly, module 1 (M1) simulates the effects of fiscal policies on disposable household income using the tax-benefit microsimulation program EUROMOD fed with the Italian EU-SILC 2010 data. Secondly, module 2 (M2) exploits data provided by the Italian birth cohort called Nascita e Infanzia: gli Effetti dell’Ambiente (NINFEA), translated as Birth and Childhood: the Effects of the Environment study, and runs a series of concatenated regressions in order to estimate the prospective effects of income on child body mass index (BMI) at different ages. Finally, module 3 (M3) uses dynamic microsimulation techniques that combine the population structure and incomes obtained by M1, with regression model specifications and estimated effect sizes provided by M2, projecting BMI distributions according to the simulated policy scenarios. Results Both universal benefits, such as universal basic income (BI), and targeted interventions, such as child benefit (CB) for poorer households, have a significant effect on childhood overweight, with a prevalence ratio (PR) in 10-year-old children—in comparison with the baseline fiscal system—of 0.88 (95%CI 0.82–0.93) and 0.89 (95%CI 0.83–0.94), respectively. The impact of the fiscal reforms was even larger for child obesity, reaching a PR of 0.67 (95%CI 0·50–0.83) for the simulated BI and 0.64 (95%CI 0.44–0.84) for CB at the same age. While both types of policies show similar effects, the estimated costs for a 1% prevalence reduction in overweight and obesity with respect to the baseline scenario is much lower with a more focalised benefit policy than with universal ones. Conclusions Our results show that fiscal policies can have a strong impact on childhood health conditions. Focalised interventions that increase family income, especially in the most vulnerable populations, can help to prevent child overweight and obesity. Robust microsimulation models to forecast the effects of fiscal policies on health should be considered as one of the instruments to reach the Health in All Policies (HiAP) goals.