There is a great new paper that links inequality in infant health to later outcomes across 19th and 20th century Irish history.
I wonder if one could use the paper for other countries to back out the impact of direct and indirect discrimination? By direct, I mean discrimination that effects the recipient as an adult; by indirect I mean an unequal division of public investment that affects the individual as a child.
I would like belatedly point out that the Peña administration has walked back its walkback of the soda tax. Among a public outcry, the Senate overturned the Chamber amendment reducing the tax. So this would be at least the second huge corrupt botch that the Peña administration managed to undo.
Time to celebrate! At least until they raise the beer tax. Which would be a good idea, by the way.
Mexico’s Peña administration reminds me a little of America’s second Bush administration: every time something good comes out of it they seem a little surprised and try to walk it back. For the Bush administration we have the examples of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 or the Energy Policy Act of 2005, both awesome ideas turned into dog’s breakfasts. (And later fixed, I should add.) For the Peña administration, we have the sugary soda tax. (Among other things.)
The Mexican congress passed the 10% tax on soda in 2013. Consumption crashed. Mexicans drank 163 liters of soda per year, 40% more than Americans. (Soda is one of the few products that Americans consume using the metric system, so I’ve left it in liters.)
There was some debate about the effect of the tax. Would producers pass it on or would they absorb it? If they passed it on, how would consumers respond to a relatively small price shift? After all, inflation in Mexico has been running at about 4% per year for a decade, so consumers might just shrug off a 10% increase in prices as part of the inflationary background noise.* Or they might just jones their Cokes filled with genuine cane sugar so much that they suck up the damage.
Well, we found out. Consumption went down 12%. Awesome sauce! Excellent! So you would think that the tax would now be raised to the 20%-30% level.
Nope. The Chamber of Deputies just voted to cut it back to 5%. That sound is my head hitting my desk for the second time in a week.
The bill went through on a vote of 423-33, but that doesn’t quite capture what happened. The soda tax cut was slipped into the overall revenue bill with no debate at all. Then a PRI-PAN alliance blocked any attempt to amend the legislation.
But I guess it is okay because the PAN minority leader, Marko Cortés, tells us that the tax cut will only apply to low-calorie soft drinks.
Man, this is awful. Vote PRD, I guess.
Continue reading "Worthwhile Mexican initiative ... undone!" »
“The Philippines’ health department urged people to avoid kissing and hugging in public.”
This led a colleague to ask me, “Is kissing and hugging in private somehow safer?????”
An unwanted sign of North American convergence has been the convergence of the Mexican waistline with the American one.
Today's Financial Times ran a story about obesity in Mexico. The figures are sobering, and obvious to anyone who rides a pesero in Mexico City, although you could miss it in Polanco or Condesa. 4.1 million 5-to-11 year olds — 26% of the total — are overweight or obese. Two-thirds of male adults are overweight, as are 71.9% of females.
We wrote a bit about this in Mexico since 1980, especially in chapter 6. Diabetes was the number-one killer when we wrote. What we didn't know was that treating diabetes consumes one-third of the health budget, according to the FT. Now, I still don't know that we know that, and I don't trust the FT's numbers. But I believe the trend.
The future in most countries, I think, is going to be Big Government. Soon what you eat and how you eat it will be taxed and regulated. I don't particularly like the idea. I used to be a heavy drinker, by American standards if not by European or Mexican ones, and the only reason I don't smoke a cigar or two every day is that my wife won't let me. (That's also why I'm no longer a heavy drinker, in fact.) But the fact is that nobody pays for their own health treatment in later life: either an insurance company does, or, if you're under insured, the United States will pick up the tab. So unless some sort of miracle Singularity-related program activity comes along to either make us all capable of pigging out and staying thin, or making it healthy to carry about lots of excess adipose tissue, Big Government is going to get what you eat.
Or so I think at this particular moment. As those of you who've known me know, I change my mind a lot. It may be the only way in which I resemble Andrew Sullivan. So, in that vein, counterarguments?
HDTD's man in the Philippines, Noel Maurer, continues guest-blogging, this time on the effects of the medical brain drain on the Philippines. (This might be of interest to our new Armenian readers. Welcome! Compare! Contrast! We're all in this together.)
On Wednesday I spoke to Dr. Maria Lorenzo, a prominent researcher at the Philippine National Institutes of Health. The PNIH is located in an old shambling colonial era building, which in the Philippines means the Depression or thereabouts: 1930, not the nineteenth century. The facilities are rather run down. The research they do there, however, is excellent.
One of the Philippines big worries is the loss of skilled personnel, particularly in health care. Health care workers make up only about a quarter of all skilled emigrants, but that’s the only statistic about the outflux that isn't impressive.
There are roughly 200,000 practicing doctors and 300,000 registered nurses in the Philippines. Compare those numbers to the approximately 130,000 nurses (many of whom had trained as doctors) who work abroad.
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