International consumption patterns for proteins and fats: intra-distributional mobility and the role of income elasticity.
2009; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1109-2580
Autores Tópico(s)Economic theories and models
ResumoAbstract Stochastic kernels are used in this paper to investigate intra-distribution dynamics in the world per capita intakes of proteins and fats. The analysis of actual transitions over the last 40 years indicates that lagging countries improved their position relative to the leading. Long-run (steady-state) distributions have been obtained using estimated intake change models. These distributions have been compared to virtual ones revealing that the income elasticity of demand or equivalently the rate of growth in per capita income does have a strong influence on the dispersion of intakes at the steady-state. Key Words: Nutrient Intakes, Stochastic Kernels JEL Classification: Q1 D12, C14 (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.) Introduction The dynamic evolution of dietary patterns in different parts of the world has attracted considerable attention in the economic research since the early 1980s. Blandford (1984), Wheelock and Frank (1989), Herrmann and Roder (1995), Uhi (1991), Connor (1994), and Gil et al. (1995), compared the dietary patterns in developed countries and they found that diets were getting increasingly similar; Grigg (1995) analyzed the factors (e.g. economic, environmental, cultural) influencing the spatial variation in the world protein consumption; Fousekis and Lazaridis (2005) investigated the dynamics of the world caloric (energy) intakes. They found that despite the higher availability of food at a global level, the differences between low- and high-intake countries are still considerable making, thus, convergence in the foreseeable future unlikely. Policy makers have also a keen interest in the evolution of the international nutrient consumption patterns since both under-nutrition in low-income countries and over-nutrition in the more affluent ones accounts for a significant proportion of deaths and chronic disease all over the world (The World Health Report, 2002). The overwhelming majority of the empirical studies regarding convergence in per capita food consumption (or in per capita nutrient intakes) have been based on the so called Barro' s regression in which the change in consumption over a period of time is regressed on an initial consumption level and other variables which are assumed to affect consumption growth. A negative and statistically coefficient of the initial consumption level in such regression is taken to imply convergence. As shown by Quah in a flurry of papers (e.g. Quah, 1993a, 1993b, 1996a, 1996b, 1997), however, Barro's regressions are not quite informative about convergence or divergence. For Quah, questions related to persistence (here, tendency of countries to retain their rank in the crosssection nutrient intake distribution), mobility (here, low intake countries become high intake ones and the opposite), convergence (here, all countries attain very similar intake levels) and club formation (here, countries catching-up with one another but only within particular groups) can be properly addressed by developing a probability model of transitions, that means, by developing the law of motion for the entire cross-section intake distribution. In this context, the objective of the present paper is the analysis of intra-distribution dynamics for two nutrients, namely, proteins and fats. While most of the earlier empirical studies relied on data from few Western or OECD countries the present work relies on data from 103 countries around the world. The empirical investigation is based on stochastic kernels.1 Moreover, given that for economists income elasticity is considered to be a very important determinant of demand for nutrients, the paper follows an approach proposed recently by Fingleton and Lopez-Bazo (2003) to examine the effect of income elasticity on the shape of the long-run intake distributions. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 contains the analytical framework (transition density functions and simulation of the long-run intake distributions). …
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