| Abstract: |
Personal lifestyle choices such as leisure-time physical activity are major
determinants of both the health and happiness of individuals. However, price
discrimination exists between municipalities at almost public sports
facilities. An economic intervention to change the cost of using public sports
facilities could affect both the level of participation in sports and the
health of the participants. Workers in rural areas have better access to
public sports facilities, but lower income workers did not tend to engage in
leisure-time physical activity. Using micro-data from nationwide surveys, we
examined the effects of the policy to promote cross-border use of public
sports facilities by workers in Japan, taking into account the endogeneity
problem among physical activity, self-assessed health and happiness. We
analyzed the relationship between physical inactivity and health using two
latent dichotomous variables. As a proxy variable of the number of potential
users of public sports facilities, the ratio of population to the number of
public sports facilities was used. The seemingly unrelated bivariate probit
model of latent physical inactivity and latent health provided the best
specification. The ratio of population to the number of public sports
facilities had two opposite effects. One was a negative effect on physical
inactivity and the other was a positive effect on latent health. We concluded
that abolishing price discrimination between municipalities to promote the
cross-border use of public sports facilities would increase the health of the
individuals. Since population has been decreasing in most municipalities in
Japan, with the exception of several large cities, a policy which abolishes
the price discrimination between municipalities would seem to be a good health
policy. |