Economics

Economic Insecurity:
Health implications

Department of Economics
Dr. Lars Osberg
Thursday Oct. 25, 2018
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
BAC 234

Economic insecurity is a common term in popular discourse and the focus of much, if not most, social policy, but uninsurable, unavoidable downside risk fits poorly with neo-classical economics. Defined as: “the anxiety produced by a lack of economic safety, i.e. by an inability to obtain protection against subjectively significant potential economic losses.”, it is worth studying because (1) measurement of economic (in)security should be part of measurement of economic well-being; (2) individuals insure and/or change behaviour to mitigate costs of uninsurable hazards; (3) economic security has been defined as a basic human right and (4) the nativism of the economically insecure has important political economy implications in contemporary societies.

This seminar focusses on the implications of economic insecurity for individual mental health and obesity. After discussing the importance of economic insecurity for the Index of Economic Well-Being, it surveys a series of papers which use panel data and the natural experiments, individual fixed effects, Diff-in-Diff econometric methodology to find a causal role for greater economic insecurity in: (1) obesity prevalence due to Unemployment Insurance cuts in Canada in the 1990s; (2) mental and physical health in Australia in the 2000s and (3) child obesity in families affected by the end of the Iron Rice Bowl in China, due to State Owned Enterprise reform. Notably, adverse health impacts are heavily gendered, larger for the less educated but important for all but the most affluent, experienced both by adults who actually suffer income losses and whose probability of loss increases and by children in affected families and somewhat mitigated by social insurance payments.

Lars Osberg is currently McCulloch Professor of Economics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, but he began life in Ottawa, Ontario. As an undergraduate, he attended Queen’s University, Kingston and the London School of Economics and Political Science. After two years working for the Tanzania Sisal Corporation as a CUSO volunteer, he went to Yale University for his Ph.D. He has had visiting positions at New York University and the Universities of Cambridge, Sydney, New South Wales, Essex, Queensland and Oxford. As well, he has been Visiting Research Fellow at Research on Poverty Alleviation (REPOA), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Indira Ghandi Institute for Development Research. Mumbai, India and the Statistics Directorate, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris, France.

His first book was Economic Inequality in Canada (1981) and the most recent is The Age of Increasing Inequality, forthcoming in September, 2018. In between there have been nine others, four editions of an introductory economics textbook and numerous refereed articles in professional journals, book chapters, reviews, reports and miscellaneous publications. His current research emphasizes the implications of increasing inequality and the measurement and determinants of poverty, economic insecurity, inequality of opportunity and economic well-being. Among other professional responsibilities, he was President of the Canadian Economics Association in 1999-2000.