Abstract
There is growing policy interest in encouraging better dietary choices. We study a nationally-implemented policy – the UK Healthy Start scheme – that introduced vouchers for fruit, vegetables and milk. We show that the policy has increased spending on fruit and vegetables and has been more effective than an equivalent-value cash benefit. We also show that the policy improved the nutrient composition of households' shopping baskets, with no offsetting changes in spending on other foodstuffs.
Highlights
Increasing rates of obesity and diet-related disease are major challenges across the developed world, leading to growing interest amongst the policy community in how to improve dietary choices (Lancet, 2011; Gortmaker et al, 2011)
Our contribution in this paper is to study the impact of the UK Healthy Start scheme, a large-scale, nationally-implemented scheme that distributes vouchers that can only be spent on specific healthy foods to low-income households with young children with the aim of increasing expenditure on fruit and vegetables, ideally feeding through into consumption
The estimated marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of vouchers is 0.144 (±0.285); in other words, each additional £1 of Healthy Start vouchers caused households to increase their spending on fresh fruit and vegetables by 14 pence
Summary
Increasing rates of obesity and diet-related disease are major challenges across the developed world, leading to growing interest amongst the policy community in how to improve dietary choices (Lancet, 2011; Gortmaker et al, 2011). Standard economic theory predicts that the effect of such vouchers will be greatest for distorted consumers (i.e. those who would in the absence of the vouchers spend less than the value of the vouchers on the targeted good), and will be equivalent to cash for infra-marginal consumers (i.e. those who would in the absence of the vouchers spend at least the value of the vouchers on the targeted good) It is an empirical question whether spending on fruit and vegetables increased as a result of the reform, and whether the vouchers improved the overall nutrient composition of households’ shopping baskets, since recipient households could respond by adjusting their spending on other food items, with possible nutritional consequences
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