Table 1 Inclusion criteria

Focus

Includes: Studies that retrospectively analyse the impacts of economic globalization processes on nutrition and related health outcomes, both in high, medium and low income countries.

Methods

Includes: Quantitative, empirical studies that analyse associations between economic globalization and nutrition and related health outcomes (e.g. multi-country regression analysis controlling for covariates or country heterogeneity, multi-level regression, quasi-experimental designs, time series analysis).

Excludes: Prospective simulation based analysis, qualitative studies, studies that use quantitative information descriptively, without statistical analysis.

Outcomes

Includes: Diet-related health outcomes (e.g. diabetes, CVD). Measures and proxies for nutrition outcomes (e.g. anthropometric measurements, body mass index, food and nutrient intake, availability or supply of foods or nutrients in context specific cases (e.g. availability/supply of any foods/nutrients in undernutrition context or availability/supply of unhealthy foods (clearly defined) in any context).

Excludes: Health outcomes that cannot be linked to nutrition; mortality and life expectancy outcomes (cannot be linked directly to nutrition); supply of food (nutrients) without clear link to nutrition in the population context.

Definitions

Includes: Studies looking at trade flows, tariff changes, trade and investment agreements or policies, trade openness; measures of economic globalization. We do not include studies that focus exclusively on global flows of information, social or cultural globalization.

Excludes: Studies analysing the impacts of policies or agreements that might be affected by trade negotiations (e.g. national agricultural or monetary policy); impact of measures introduced to counteract the effects of trade liberalization, such as export bans.

Year and language of publication

Includes: articles published from January 1990 in English language.