A New Demand System for Food in Austria

Understanding a food market requires timely data and adequate models of consumer demand. For Austria, many data sets on food consumption are available, however, the understanding of food demand has been fragmented. This paper estimates a demand system for different types of food for Austria. We use the censored LA/EASI demand system and apply it to eight types of food. By combining micro-data of various waves of consumer surveys, we derive non-linear Engel curves and heterogeneous preferences over time. As Austrian data does not include prices at household-level we reconstruct those by using Stone-Lewbel (SL) price indices. After the estimation of the demand system, we calculate own price elasticities for the eight different types of food