A comparative analysis of food demand and its determinants in six EU countries

Open Access

Abstract

This cross-country investigation of food demand and its determinants confirmed a number of stylized facts: first, consumers respond to prices and the law of demand applies to all foods at a fairly high level of product disaggregation; second, most food products are necessities, as their demand responds positively but less than proportionally to changes in consumption expenditure, implying that Engle's law is also ve-rified in all countries; third, for all countries, some cross-price elasticities are both statistically significant and relatively large, which confirms the necessity of considering whole diets rather than only subsets of foods when analyzing policies to enhance the sustainability of food consumption patterns. Beyond those well-known regularities, however, the analysis indicates that demand relationships remain highly specific to each country.