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...

The model for analyzing the impact of the Food Stamp Program on food purchased for use at home indicates that no continuous relationship exists between at-home food expenditures and income of food stamp participant households As previous studies have not allowed for this fact, they may have...

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...

The authors propose six questions relevant to the evaluation of all social system models, and apply them to the Barr-Gale model for forecasting the Consumer Price Index for Food. While analysts invest much effort in developing new economic models, relatively little attention is paid to...

A model is developed to forecast the food price component of the consumer price index published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The'model relates retail food prices to prices received by farmers and to wage rates in food marketing industries. The farm value and farm-retail spread of 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....

If the entire U.S. population were to select one food pattern among those that meet the American Heart Association recommendations for a fat-controlled, low-cholesterol diet, calorie intake would decline about 13 percent compared with present consumption. The cost would be about a tenth higher,...

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...