Over the last 20 years, consumers have spent a declining portion of their income on food for consumption at home, while the share of income spent on meals purchased at restaurants, cafeterias, and fast-food chains has held constant This article attempts to explain this phenomenon by estimating a...

The current situation and prospects for coffee are of widespread interest to American consumers and to those who supply them, and it is of vital interest to the many Latin American countries that depend on coffee as a primary source of foreign exchange earnings. The smaller per capita use of...

Measures of productivity, for agriculture as well as for the private sector of the economy as a whole, have a long and fruitful history in helping to interpret movements in output, prices, and factor costs. To an economist who is familiar with productivity research, and who has watched the...

This article analyzes 1955 data on gross farm income, production expenditures, net income, and marketing charges, by major commodity groups. This piece of research is largely a byproduct of the Agricultural Industrial Relations Study of 1955 which provided some insights into the impact of...

Establishment of parity prices by way of the unit of purchasing power approach—the concept on which, the parity formula is now based—may not adequately reflect parity of incomes and living standards for farmers. This is true especially if the norm or base period is far back in the...

For a half-century the parity ratio has served as the most commonly used measure of the effects of relative price changes on the farm economy The authors present a consistent economic model which measures the price-related income effects of relative price changes in selected sectors of the U.S....

Measures of per capita dollar incomes seem, at first hand, to be a good simple first approximation to obtaining some idea of the differences that exist between farmers' living standards and those of nonfarmers at any one point in time. But unfortunately, the following factors, among others, make...

The relative merits of different methods of measuring volume of retail sales of particular commodities has been a debated subject in recent years. As a byproduct of an experiment in retail store merchandising, a direct comparison of some alternative methods is made in this paper, a matter of...

This article presents newly developed national estimates of average income, per farm and per person in the farm family, for each economic class of farm in 1949. Aggregates and averages of farm income and expenditures are published regularly in considerable detail in The Farm Income Situation....