This database contains food demand elasticities estimates collected from a literature review carried out in 2015 as part of a contract funded by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) (contract n° 2015X144.FEM). It served as a basis for the meta-analysis of price and income elasticities of food demand presented in Femenia (2019).

Data collection: Two reports providing food demand elasticities published by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) (Seale et al. (2003) and Muhammad et al. (2011)) are frequently used to calibrate demand functions in global economic models. In these reports, price and income elasticities are estimated for eight broad food categories and for a large number of countries. This broad level of country coverage renders these elasticity data well-suited for calibrating large simulation models. Economists might however wish to use other source of elasticities for different reasons when, for instance, they consider food products at a higher disaggregation level or when they wish to compare results obtained with a calibration of demand parameters based on USDA estimates to those obtained with a calibration based on other estimates given in the literature. The USDA provides a literature review database (USDA, 2005), which contains this type of information. This database collects own price, cross price, expenditure and income demand elasticity estimates from papers that have been published and/or presented in the United States (US) between 1979 and 2005. While the database covers a large variety of products at various aggregation levels, few countries are included. These two sources of data, namely, the USDA’s estimates given in Seale et al. (2003) and Muhammad et al. (2011) and the USDA’s literature review database, were used as a basis to build the database presented here. We started with the structure of the USDA literature review database, which includes useful information on each elasticity estimate, such as the references of the papers from which the estimates have been collected; the countries, products and time periods concerned; the types of data used to conduct estimations; and the demand models estimated. The elasticities estimated by Seale et al. (2003) and Muhammad et al. (2011) were also included. We then reviewed the primary studies to check the information included in the USDA database and to ensure the consistency of the data. Of the 74 references present in these data, five PhD dissertations were not available to us, thus restricting our ability to verify the data and to collect new information, and we decided to exclude these references.
In a second step, we searched for new references providing food demand elasticity estimates in the economic literature with a focus on pre-2005 studies dealing with countries other than the US and China and with a focus on post-2005 studies regardless of the country. The search was performed with Google Scholar in March 2015 using the following combinations of keywords: “price, elasticities, food, demand” and “income, elasticities, food, demand”. We did not limit our search to published papers; working papers, reports, and papers presented at conferences were also included. A total of 72 references were collected in this way. All price and income elasticity estimates of food demand reported in these references were collected. Among own price elasticities we distinguished uncompensated (Marshallian) price elasticities from compensated (Hicksian) elasticities. The final database contains 25,117 food demand elasticities estimates collected from 148 studies published between 1973 and 2014.

Information included and data coding: In addition to the values of elasticity estimates and the references of the primary studies from which they have been collected, our database incorporate several variables aimed at providing detailed information on the estimated values. These descriptive variables contain information related to the type of data used to estimate the elasticities (time series, panel or cross section), to whether these data have been collected at the micro (household) or macro (country) level, to the decade in which they have been collected, which ranges from 1950 to 2010, and to the countries and products to which these data refer. To homogenize the information on food products, product names as they appear in the primary studies are mapped to the following eight product categories: beverages and tobacco, cereals, dairy products, fruits and vegetables, oils and fats, meat and fish, other food products and non-food products. Given that these categories are in some cases much broader than the product levels considered in primary studies, a variable representing the aggregation level of the primary data is also associated with each observation. The following four aggregation levels are considered: “global food aggregate”; “product category aggregate”, which corresponds to the aforementioned categories; “product level”, which refers to single products, for instance bananas and apples for fruits, beef and poultry for meat, wheat and corn for cereals, etc.; “differentiated product level”, which refers to products differentiated by specific characteristics, for instance, organic or conventional for fruits and vegetables or cereals and types of cut for meat. Country names are converted into standard ISO-alpha-3 country codes (International Organization for Standardization) and are mapped to 11 world regions. Where applicable, we also report in our data information concerning the types (urban, rural or any type) of households from which the primary data have been collected. Finally, information related to the functional form of the demand system from which the elasticities have been estimated is also reported in the database. A description of these variables and the coding of their modalities is provided in the "Elasticities_Review_datacoding" file associated to the database file.

References Femenia, F. (2019). A meta-analysis of the price and income elasticities of food demand. German Journal of Agricultural Economics, 68(2), 77-98. Muhammad, A., Seale, J.L., Meade, B., Regmi, A. (2011). International Evidence on Food Consumption Patterns: An Update Using 2005 International Comparison Program Data. USDA-ERS Technical Bulletin, No. 1929, 59 p Seale, J.L., Regmi, A., Bernstein, J. (2003). International evidence on food consumption patterns. USDA Technical Bulletin, No. TB-1904. 70 p. USDA. (2005). Commodity and food elasticities. Accessed May 2015.