Arantxa is a health economist currently working as an associate professor at the National
Institute of Public Health, Mexico. She is national researcher II by the National System of
Researchers (CONACYT Mexico), and Researcher E by the National Institutes of Health.
She earned her PhD degree in Health Systems Research at the Johns Hopkins School of
Public Health. President of the Health Economics Academic Committee since 2007 and
Coordinator of the Master in Science Committee since 2015.
Over the last decade, her career has been devoted to the analysis of the nutrition transition
in developing countries, studying how food environments have contributed to the obesity
epidemic in urban and rural areas. She has been working on the design and impact
evaluation of fiscal policies to reduce the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages
(SSB) and energy-dense nutrient-poor foods in Mexico. She is currently evaluating
different scenarios of taxes increases in Mexico for alcohol, SSB and non-essential food.
Arantxa has also collaborated in the impact evaluation of the marketing regulation and
labeling in Chile. Other topics of interest are: the design and evaluation of HIV/AIDS
interventions in the most at risk populations and the estimation of the health and
economic burden of suboptimal breastfeeding practices in Mexico.
