The multi-faceted nature of Indian development brings with it many interesting puzzles. One such puzzle is the relationship between economic growth and caloric intake in India. While the Indian economy has grown leaps and bounds since the early 1980s, mean caloric consumption has not appeared to follow suit, even showing decreases across certain survey rounds. This is all a bit bizarre since, historically, for countries at India's level of development, caloric consumption has generally found to be increasing in GDP per capita. So what accounts for the contrarian trends in the Indian data?
Economists Angus Deaton and Jean Dreze suggest the following explanation in a recent working paper:
The reduction in calorie consumption cannot be attributed to declining real incomes, nor to any increase in the relative price of food. Our leading hypothesis, on which much work remains to be done, is that, as real incomes and wages have increased, leading to some nutritional improvement, there has been an offsetting reduction in calorie requirements due to declining levels of physical activity and possibly also to various improvements in the health environment. If correct, this analysis does not imply that Indians are currently adequately nourished; nothing could be further from the truth.
As I mentioned in earlier posts, countries in the developing world, including India, are experiencing increases in overweight, obesity and associated morbidities. If the Deaton-Dreze hypothesis is correct, researchers should be paying very careful attention to the impacts of technological change and preferences on energy expenditure and physical activity, among other things, in generating these rises in the prevalence of high body mass and adverse cardiovascular and metabolic profiles.
I will definitely say more about these issues in later posts, as I make progress on my own study on obesity in developing countries. Stay tuned.
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