Abstract
Obesity and overweight are spreading fast in developing countries, and have reached world record levels in some of them. Capturing the size, patterns and trends of the problem has, however, been severely hampered by the lack of comparable data in low and middle income countries. We seek to begin to fill this gap by testing several hypotheses on the determinants/correlates of overweight among women, related to the influence of economic and technological development. We undertake econometric analysis of nationally representative data on about 878,000 women aged 15–49 from 244 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for 56 countries over the years 1991–2009. Our findings support most previously expressed hypotheses of what might explain obesity patterns in developing countries, but they also reject some prior notions and add considerable nuance to the emerging pattern.
Highlights
Obesity has become a global phenomenon not solely confined to rich countries (James, 2008; Popkin, 2007), with the total number of overweight and obese people being estimated at about 1.5 billion in 2008 worldwide (Popkin et al, 2012)
In order to study the trends and determinants of obesity and overweight in the developing countries, a small set of recent studies (Martorell et al, 2000; Mendez et al, 2005; Mendez and Popkin, 2004; Monteiro et al, 2004; Subramanian et al, 2011) has used data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), a rich source of information that had hitherto primarily been used for the analysis of fertility and ‘‘traditional’’ developing country disease challenges in the area of maternal and child health
The US data for women was taken from Flegal et al (1998) and CDC (2010), while the prevalence data for the developing countries was estimated from DHS data
Summary
Obesity has become a global phenomenon not solely confined to rich countries (James, 2008; Popkin, 2007), with the total number of overweight and obese people being estimated at about 1.5 billion in 2008 worldwide (Popkin et al, 2012). In this article we exploit to an even greater extent the DHS dataset, using data on almost one million women aged 15–49 from 244 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for 56 countries over the years 1991– 2009. We use this data to examine a broader range of questions than the previous studies that predominantly focused on how overweight, obesity or BMI in women varied between socioeconomic groups within a cross
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
