Food for thought: A meta-analysis of animal food demand elasticities across world regions

Abstract

Animal food products are featured prominently in current debates on dietary transitions. Food demand projections and policy evaluations often draw on expenditure and price elasticity estimates; thus, it is crucial that these elasticities are robust at an adequate product disaggregation, well-founded, and comparable both across products and countries. To the extent of our knowledge, there is no analysis providing meta-elasticities for all world regions, all food groups, and disaggregated animal foods. In this study, we cover this gap and collect a database with more than 50,000 demand elasticities from 444 studies and 87 countries. As 50% of our sample involves animal food products, we are able to provide food demand meta-elasticities for 14 food groups, of which ten are animal food. We present a set of estimated expenditure, own-price, and cross-price; unconditional and conditional; and uncompensated and compensated elasticities; and discuss their policy implications.