We investigated the relationship between income inequality and all-cause mortality in 87 regional county municipalities (RCMs) of Quebec (Canada) while accounting for time lags and effects of other socioeconomic variables. We presumed to be true that income inequality entails stress and depression. Thus, these phenomena were tested as mediating factors. The data used consist of eight (8) area-based chronological variables: mortality rate, Gini index, disposable income, criminality rate, number of physicians, density of population, and the proportion of people reporting feeling stressed or depressed. The association between income inequality and mortality was analyzed using the generalized method of moments (GMM) approach with local fixed effects to control unobservable characteristics. Our results show that higher income inequality led to a significant increase of mortality rate with a time lag of 5 years when socioeconomic characteristics were held constant. As expected, households’ disposable income and mortality rate were negatively associated. Moreover, mortality rate was positively associated with population density and negatively associated with the number of physicians. Finally, only depression showed the potential to act as a mediating factor. Based on our findings, we suggest that, over time, income inequality, by amplifying depression phenomena, increases the mortality rate in Quebec’s RCMs.

In this article, we analyze the relationship between agricultural support measures and food import dependency for a 52-country sample from 1985 to 2017 using databases from the World Bank, the Center for Systemic Peace, and the Groningen Center for Growth and Development. Using an instrumental variable framework, we apply a continuous treatment effect and control for endogeneity to describe the extent of food import dependency in response to domestic support for agriculture. Our results suggest heterogeneous associations for aggregate food import dependency at different levels of political aid intensity, while our analysis further reveals nonlinear dose–response patterns, suggesting that moderate levels of agricultural support are associated with lower food import dependency, whereas very high support intensities are not systematically associated with additional reductions. Although estimates of dose–response functions confirm that countries providing moderate support to agriculture tend to exhibit lower levels of agri-food import dependency, these findings should nevertheless be interpreted cautiously given the potential limitations regarding instrument validity and data availability. The primary contribution of our study is the explicit modeling of heterogeneous treatment intensity effects and potential endogeneity. These findings should therefore be interpreted as conditional empirical associations rather than definitive causal effects.

This article analyzes the impact of agricultural support measures on food import dependency for a 52-country sample from 1985 to 2017 using databases from the World Bank, the Center for Systemic Peace and the Groningen Center for Growth and Development. We apply a continuous treatment effect and control for endogeneity to describe the extent of food import dependency in response to domestic support for agriculture. Our results show strong evidence of heterogeneous impacts on aggregate food import dependency at different levels of political aid intensity. Estimates of dose-response functions confirm that countries providing moderate support to agriculture tend to do better in reducing their use of agri-food imports.

The authors would like to make the following corrections to the published paper

School feeding programmes are increasingly discussed as food-security and social-protection measures in high-income countries (HICs). However, the related literature is fragmented across disciplinary and policy spaces. This paper maps and critically interprets evidence of the HIC scientific literature on school feeding using both bibliometric and thematic synthesis. Scopus retrieved 1,124 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2015 and 2026. A Canada-specific subset (n = 45) was extracted to enable a focused policy-oriented analysis. The bibliometric analysis was used to examine the trend in publications, geographic and collaboration (network), and thematic clustering that were further analysed through the qualitative thematic analysis. The findings indicate that the literature has grown significantly since 2019, and most studies are concerned with nutrition and health outcomes, with governance, equity, sustainability, and lived experience being relatively under-explored. The production of research is geographically distributed in a few Anglophone nations. However, Canadian scholarly production is small in new national policy prospects. The evidence shows a longstanding inclination to view school feeding as an intervention of nutrition rather than a food-security approach systemic to the welfare, governance, and food systems. This research focuses on contributing to Global Food Security scholarship by revealing structural gaps and underdeveloped research areas. It provides a conceptual framing of school feeding in HICs as a second-order food-security intervention requiring a systems-level policy and research strategy. This paper provides the first integrated bibliometric and thematic synthesis of school feeding research in high-income countries with explicit policy implications for Canada.