No abstract

Accurate mortality data are critical for understanding the impact of COVID-19 and learning lessons from crisis responses. But official statistics risk undercounting deaths due to limited testing and underreporting, especially in developing countries. Thailand has experienced four COVID-19 waves and used a color-coded, province-level system for lockdowns. To account for deaths directly and indirectly caused by COVID-19, this paper uses mixed-effects modelling to estimate counterfactual deaths from January 2020 to December 2021 and construct a monthly time series of provincial excess mortality. The model reveals that excess mortality was much higher than official figures, with the largest undercounting for males and the elderly. Then, recently developed panel regression methods are used to characterize the correlations among restrictions, mobility, and excess mortality. The findings suggest that lockdowns stemmed excess mortality with a three-month lag.

Studies have shown how food loss and waste occur in the various stages of the food supply chain. Among these stages, household food waste in the consumption stage has been identified as a key contributor to food waste generation. Several dimensions such as food preparation and handling; consumer behavior, environmental awareness and concern; social norms and many other variables were posited by scholars as predictors of food waste generation. There is no consensus albeit as to what among the aforementioned dimensions influences food waste at the household level and the role of consumer values and social norms has not been thoroughly explored. This research was conducted to focus on the gaps, utilized a semi-structured interview for three hundred three (303) household respondents, and adopted Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) for data measure and analysis. The findings of this research reveal that food habits such as food conservation and acceptance of expiration date-based prices and suboptimal food determine the extent of food waste generation. Materialism is found to have a direct impact on food waste behavior while an environmental concern, on the other hand, supports waste prevention and recycling behavior. Moreover, environmental concern was positively linked to descriptive and injunctive norms. To explain, households who hold strong environmental norms manifest environmental concerns such as opposing waste and wasting less. Keywords: Food waste behavior, food waste generation, household food waste, social norms.