It is ironic that while millions of people are dying of starvation each year in most parts of the world, many Americans are dying as an indirect result of an overabundance of food. Further, billions of dollars are spent each year overfeeding the American public, which then leads to the spending of billions of dollars more each year on various weight loss methods. This review will investigate various aspects of overweight and obesity, and show how they are affected by physical activity. But first, we must define and differentiate between the terms overweight and obesity.
Recent economic debate has reopened the old question of the wealth and poverty of nations. The answer to this question involves all aspects of human life: education, religion, institutions, technology, the diffusion of knowledge and, more recently, geography. The latter, it is said, has contributed to shaping the destiny of nations and their people (although not inescapably). For instance, Diamond (1999) states “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people’s environments.”
The idea that geographical and environmental factors have influenced social development is not new. Landes (1999) argues that European economic advantages are the result, in part, of the favorable rainfall patterns and mild seasonal differences that allowed Europeans to raise bigger and better animals than those of other lands. Larger animals brought the agricultural, transport and military advantages that reinforced Western European economic leadership for several centuries. Geography has clearly had some effect on the shaping of the economic history of countries and regions. However, the amount by which geographical factors affect current income per capita and economic development variations is a question that is beginning to be answered. In this paper we will attempt to establish an answer to this question in terms of Colombian inter-regional income per capita variations.
It is generally understood that the distortionary effects of capital income taxation are magnified in open economies. For example, the standard theoretical model suggests that the optimal effective marginal tax rate of a source-based capital income tax in a small open economy is zero (see Gordon, 1986). Raising this tax rate increases the required pre-tax rate of return in that location; this reduces the quantity of capital located there, which in turn creates an excess burden which could be avoided by taxing immobile factors directly.
