u s sweeteners combating excess consumption with an excise tax obesity is a public health problem in the united states that has been linked to excess sweetener consumption the american heart association aha recommends no more than 6 9 teaspoons capita day while the u s food and drug administration fda recommends 200 calories capita day of caloric sweetener consumption both recommendations are well below the reported 2016 sweetener consumption levels we quantify the input tax rates needed to reduce the current excess sweetener consumption level to the aha and fda recommended standards we calculate the joint tax in the united states on two major sweeteners sugar and high fructose corn syrup hfcs to be 31 and 24 cents per pound respectively based on the aha standard and 19 and 17 cents per pound respectively using the fda standard these taxes would be roughly the magnitude of the existing sugar and hfcs prices in both cases the tax incidence on producers is much smaller than on consumers our focus is very different from past studies in that it deals with the effect of taxes on inputs to meet the recommended target rather than a selective tax sugar sweetened beverage tax if a sweetener tax were implemented u s sugar and hfcs producers would lose us 398 us 489 and us 683 us 844 million per year respectively

foreign ownership and the theory of trade and welfare some standard topics in the theory of international trade are reconsidered in this paper by distinguishing between national and aggregate income when fixed supplies of foreign inputs are present within the home country under conditions that would ensure a national welfare gain if foreign ownership were absent international transfer economic growth or tariff policy might cause a national welfare loss in the presence of foreign ownership the techniques developed could be applied to other domestic distinctions such as those based on race sex age or ethnicity and to the theory of customs unions in a three country world

the effects of immigration in a distorted two sector economy this paper examines the income employment and distributional impact of immigration on a recipient economy facing an administered wage distortion it is found that immigration increases the unemployment rate of the native population and shifts income distribution against labor and in favor of the nonlabor input its effect on the total income of the non immigrants is however ambiguous and depends on the relative importance of the increase in unemployment versus the net increase in the rent received by the owners of the non labor input

international migration and real wages is there any neo classical ambiguity abstract recent research has shown that while labor emigration increases the nominal wage rate the impact on the real wage rate remains quite ambiguous the present paper reexamines the issue under the standard two factor two commodity international trade model normally employed for this purpose the principal finding of this paper is that once the problem is correctly formulated and analyzed introducing utility maximizing consumers no such ambiguity exists indeed labor emigration always leads to an increase in the welfare real wage of labor in the source country

international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in the source country abstract this paper examines the economic effects of emigration in a source country producing both traded and non traded commodities it is shown that even if the economy faces fixed terms of trade emigration can still affect the welfare of the non migrants and the direction of the effect in this context will always be negative

a note on international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in the source country abstract this note extends the work of rivera batiz to the case where capital is collectively owned and the decision to emigrate entails both a withdrawal of labor services from the source country and the surrender of the ownership of capital in this framework which seems to have wide real world relevance for socialist labor managed and peasant economies it is found that emigration helps increase the welfare of the non migrant this result which seems quite robust to its specifications is exactly the opposite of that of rivera batiz and points to the need for great caution in drawing policy conclusions with regard to issues pertaining to emigration

international factor movements in the presence of a fixed factor abstract to the basic model of international factor mobility is added a third immobile factor unlike the basic model the factor flows that result from a policy of free mobility are now uniquely determined additionally a large variety of privately optimal national policies is predicted each dependent upon the country s endowment pattern and the fiscal instruments available to it several of the predicted policies e g subsidies paid to migrant factors and simultaneous restrictions on the export of both factors are incompatible with the basic model

the danish tax on saturated fat short run effects on consumption substitution patterns and consumer prices of fats abstract denmark introduced a tax on saturated fat in food products with effect from october 2011 the objective of this paper is to make an effect assessment of this tax for some of the product categories most significantly affected by the new tax namely fats such as butter butter blends margarine and oils this assessment is done by conducting an econometric analysis on weekly food purchase data from a large household panel dataset gfk panel services denmark spanning the period from january 2008 until july 2012 the econometric analysis suggest that the introduction of the tax on saturated fat in food products has had some effects on the market for the considered products in that the level of consumption of fats dropped by 10 15 furthermore the analysis points at shifts in demand from high price supermarkets towards low price discount stores at least for some types of oils and fats a shift that seems to have been utilised by discount chains to raise the prices of butter and margarine by more than the pure tax increase due to the relatively short data period with the tax being active interpretation of these findings from a long run perspective should be done with considerable care it is thus recommended to repeat and broaden the analysis at a later stage when data are available for a longer period after the introduction of the fat tax

income inequality and international migration the purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of international factor movements on the personal distribution of income in order to get clearcut results we use a simple model of trade and migration in which there are two traded goods and three factors for any given country one of the traded goods corresponds to exports and the other to imports the three factors include capital and two types of labour skilled and unskilled we focus mainly on the alternative results of international migration of the two types of labour the geographical focus is worldwide excerpt

did the junk food tax make the hungarians eat healthier i analyse whether the introduction of the unhealthy food tax lead to significant improvements in the dietary habits of the hungarian population i focus on the consumption of processed and unprocessed food before and after the tax was levied on a range of food high in salt and sugar using data from a large scale household panel data set i estimate the consumed quantities of processed food to decrease by 3 4 due to the unhealthy food tax while the consumed quantities of unprocessed food increased by 1 1 the lowest income groups were the most responsive to the introduction of the tax despite data limitations the results indicate moderate improvement in population diet that is likely to be attributable to the tax

emigration and welfare in an economy with foreign capital abstract this paper examines the effects of emigration on welfare of the remaining residents r in an economy producing traded t and non traded n goods with the aid of foreign and domestic capital while the existing literature has established that emigration reduces the welfare of those left behind when foreign capital is not present in the economy the analysis below suggests that with foreign capital the effect on welfare may well be reversed the paper also compares the welfare implications of remittance flows back to the source country when they are used to finance consumption and when they are used to finance capital accumulation

temporary emigration and welfare the case of low skilled labor this article studies the implications of temporary emigration for the welfare of a source country the framework is one of general equilibrium where the economy s stocks of both capital and labor are endogenously determined by the saving and migration decisions of optimizing agents simulations of the model suggest that for realistic values of the parameters welfare of nonmigrants of the source country is maximized when the migrants are employed abroad for a period in the range of roughly 8 12 years the ideal duration is found to be an increasing function of the international wage differential migration costs and the degree to which the rights of migrants are protected in the host country

the impact of international migration on real wages another look abstract this paper examines the issue of how emigration alters real wages in the source country the analysis is carried out first using the two class framework developed by rivera batiz 1984 and then by means of a simple model of scale economies and imperfect competition our results indicate that within these contexts real wages are likely to decline in response to emigration if 1 the migrants possess a large fraction of physical or human capital that they take with them when migration occurs or 2 emigration reduces the scale of operation of domestic firms our conclusions are compared to those of quibria 1989

supplier commitment and production decisions under a forecast commitment contract manufacturing firms in capital intensive industries face inherent demand volatility for their products and the inability to change their capacity quickly to cope with these challenges manufacturers often enter into contracts with their customers that offer greater certainty of supply in return for more predictable orders in this paper we study a forecast commitment contract in which the customer provides a forecast the supplier makes a production commitment to the customer based on the forecast and the customers minimum order quantity is a function of the forecast and committed quantities we provide a complete analysis of the suppliers decisions when there is a single customer facing uncertain demand we first show that the supplier has two dominant commitment strategies committing to the forecast or committing to the production quantity we then characterize the jointly optimal commitment and production strategy for the supplier and extend the results to consider a capacity constraint we show that the proposed contract can moderate the suppliers motivation to underproduce and due to the structure of the contract and the form of the suppliers optimal strategy also limits the customers incentive to overforecast we also provide results for a capacitated two customer example which show that the suppliers choice of production quantity for each customer is not necessarily nondecreasing in the total available capacity

soft drink prices sales body mass index and diabetes evidence from a panel of low middle and high income countries we take advantage of four different cross country datasets containing data on 78 countries for the period 1999 2014 in order to assess the relationship of carbonated soft drinks sales as well as their prices with body mass index bmi overweight obesity and diabetes using an ecological study design and multivariate regression longitudinal estimation approaches we find that carbonated soft drink sales were significantly positively related to bmi overweight and obesity but only in the low and lower middle income countries this finding was robust to a number of sensitivity and falsification checks in this sub sample an increase in per capita soft drink sales by 1 litre per year was related to an increase of bmi by about 0 009 kg m2 p 0 1 this is a small effect implying that halving annual consumption per capita in this group of countries would result in a drop of bmi by only about 0 03 kg m2 although soft drink prices were negatively related to weight related outcomes in the sample of higher middle income and high income countries this finding was not robust to falsification checks the results thus suggest that sales restrictions to steer consumers away from soft drinks could indeed have a beneficial health effects in poorer countries although the effect magnitude appears to be very small however given potential limitations of using ecological research design results from individual level studies would be required to further ascertain the role of soft drink sales and prices in obesity and diabetes

international migration remittances and welfare in a dependent economy abstract this note extends the work of rivera batiz 1982 in an attempt to examine the role of remittances in determining the effects of migration on the welfare of the remaining residents in a small open economy producing both traded and non traded goods it is shown that if the flow of remittances exceeds a certain critical amount the remaining residents benefit from migration even if they do not receive any of the remittances themselves this is in sharp contrast with the results of the rivera batiz model in which the possibility of a gain for the non migrants is ruled out

the proof of the pudding making energy efficiency work abstract if western industrialized market economies are to realize a substantial proportion of the potential benefits of increased energy efficiency there is a need to move beyond engineering and economic estimates of efficiency potential and to consider seriously the implications of the behavioural and programme evaluation literature on energy efficiency that literature suggests that reliance upon market mechanisms alone will not permit realization of economically efficient levels of energy efficiency however if points the way toward designing energy efficiency programmes that show real promise of significantly achieving their potential in industrialized market economies

international migration remittances and real incomes effects on the source country this article deals with the impact of remittances from emigrants on real incomes for different groups in their country of origin in a two by two model with one traded and one nontraded good it is shown that emigration does not necessarily raise the real income of the emigrants themselves if the traded good is capital intensive nonmigrant workers gain and capitalists lose whereas if it is labor intensive the outcome depends on what happens to the price of the nontraded good the result of a rise is that capitalists gain and workers lose while a fall has the opposite effect excerpt

designing a tax to discourage unhealthy food and beverage purchases the case of chile the global shift towards diets high in sugar sweetened beverages ssbs and energy dense ultra processed foods is linked to higher prevalence of obesity diabetes and most other noncommunicable diseases ncds causing significant health costs chile has the highest ssb consumption in the world very high junk food intake and very rapid increases in these poor components of the diet plus obesity prevalence this study s purpose is to compare the effect of different tax schemes for ssbs and ultra processed foods on nutrient availability utilizing price elasticities which are estimated from a quadratic almost ideal demand system model using the 2011 2012 income and expenditure survey we take into account the high proportion of households not purchasing various food and beverage groups censored nature of data the food groups considered were sweets and desserts salty snacks and chips meat products and fats fruits vegetables and seafood cereals and cereal products ssb ready to drink ssb from concentrate plain water coffee and tea and milk which together represent 90 of food expenditures the simulated taxes were 1 40 price tax on ssbs 22 above the current tax level 2 a 5 cents per gram of sugar tax on products with added sugar and 3 30 price tax on all foods 27 above current tax levels and beverages 12 above the current tax level exceeding thresholds on sodium saturated fat and added sugar and for which marketing is restricted based on a chilean law effective june 16 2016 unhealthy foods are price elastic 1 99 for salty snacks and chips 1 06 for ssbs ready to drink and 1 27 for ssbs from concentrate meaning that the change in consumption is proportionally larger with respect to a change in price results are robust to different model specification and consistent among different socioeconomic sub populations overall the tax on marketing controlled foods and beverages is associated with the largest reduction in household purchases of sodium added sugar saturated fat and calorie purchases chile is unique in currently having instituted a small current ssb tax as well as marketing controls and front of package labeling of unhealthy foods and beverages the design of a larger more comprehensive tax to enhance the overall effect of these policies on healthier diets is a next critical step this study shows that a large tax on the same foods and beverages already delineated as unhealthy by the marketing controls and front of pack labeling should prove to be more effective for promoting a healthier diet

a reconsideration of the sugar sweetened beverage tax in a household production model abstract we study the impact of a hypothetical tax on sugar sweetened beverages ssbs on the u s households nutrients purchase welfare change and health benefit differently from the traditional approach food at home fah is here defined as a home good instead of a market good and consumers demands derived under the assumption that households maximize utility subject to both a money and a time constraint the model is estimated by using an incomplete approximate exact affine stone index easi demand system on a data set built by merging the u s consumer expenditure and time use surveys results show that a ssb tax would be much more effective in decreasing household nutrients purchase than it would appear by estimating a model neglecting time costs in home food production due to a lesser compensation of calories from increasing fah consumption a tax induced 38 increase in ssb price is predicted to decrease the per capita energy purchase by 41 kcal day

international migration non traded goods and economic welfare in the source country a comment abstract labor emigration redistributes income in a two factor two good economy where one good is internationally non traded labor s nominal wage rises as nominal capital payments fall recent research has shown that the prices of non traded goods rise causing society s welfare to decline here the induced change in the real income of each factor is considered separately there is an ambiguity with regard to the real income of non emigrating labor if labor spends a relatively small fraction of income on the non traded good its real income may rise even though society suffers the loss of welfare

junk food home cooking physical activity and obesity the effect of the fat tax and the thin subsidy abstract in an effort to reduce the growing prevalence of obesity a tax on junk foods known as fat tax has been proposed the revenue from which could be used to finance a thin subsidy for healthy foods or exercising equipment the present paper addresses the fat tax and thin subsidy within a food intake rational choice model assuming that healthy meals are cooked at home with purchased ingredients and time input the paper examines the effects on obesity of a tax on junk food meals and a subsidy to cooking ingredients distinguishing between a weight conscious and a non weight conscious individual and between a weight conscious individual who is physically active and physically inactive the results show that for a non weight conscious individual a fat tax will unambiguously reduce obesity whereas a thin subsidy may increase obesity however for a weight conscious individual particularly one who is physically active even a fat tax may increase obesity as it may reduce not just the consumption of junk food but also the time devoted to physical activity the paper explores conditions under which obesity will rise fall or remain intact following the introduction of a fat tax or a thin subsidy

should we stop meating like this reducing meat consumption through substitution high levels of meat consumption are increasingly being criticised for ethical environmental and social reasons plant based meat substitutes have been identified as healthy sources of protein that in comparison to meat offer a number of social environmental and health benefits and may play a role in reducing meat consumption however there has been a lack of research on the role they can play in the policy agenda and how specific meat substitute attributes can influence consumers to replace partially replace meat in their diets in this paper we examine consumers preferences for attributes of meat and meat substitute products and develop consumer segments based on these preferences the results of a choice experiment with 247 uk consumers using food labels and mince ground meat illustrate that the type of mince fat content country of origin and price are major factors that influence choice carbon footprint method of production and brand play a secondary role in determining consumers choices of meat meat substitutes latent class analysis is used to identify six consumer segments price conscious healthy eaters taste driven green organic and vegetarian consumers which have different socio demographic characteristics and meat consumption patterns future interventions and policies aimed at reducing meat consumption including labelling provision of more information financial incentives educational campaigns and new product development will be more effective if they are holistic and target specific consumer segments instead of focus on the average consumer