The demand for food grain in China: new insights into a controversy

There is a substantial controversy in the economics literature over the magnitude of the expenditure elasticity for food grain in China that is caused, to a large extent, by whether time-series or cross-section data are used in the analysis. A set of reasonable elasticities for a complete demand sys...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Zhang, Xiaobo, Mount, Timothy D., Boisvert, Richard N.
Formato: Journal Article
Lenguaje:Inglés
Publicado: Cambridge University Press 2001
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10568/156569
Descripción
Sumario:There is a substantial controversy in the economics literature over the magnitude of the expenditure elasticity for food grain in China that is caused, to a large extent, by whether time-series or cross-section data are used in the analysis. A set of reasonable elasticities for a complete demand system is estimated by using a panel of county level data in Guangdong Province for the last ten years. The results show that food grain has a small positive income elasticity, implying that food grain is not an inferior good in China. The reason that consumption per capita has not increased during a period of rapid economic growth in income is that the relative prices of the food and non-food substitutes for food grain have decreased.