Supply and Demand Elasticities for Farm Products in the Member Countries of the European Community

摘要

In recent years the value of estimating elasticities of both supply and demand has been increasingly questioned. This is due, in part, to the difficulty in providing reliable elasticity estimates and projections for agricultural commodities on the basis of the highly aggregated and variable statistics which exist in the EC countries. Some experts argue that the income level now reached in the wealthier EC countries results in low income elasticities of demand for food and frequently tend to zero. Given a high level of income, factors such as eating habits, product qualities, and relative price changes will likely play a much greater role in the future. The number of supply models in the EC are quite limited and the product-specific input-output data ideally required for the estimation of a production function is not available. Also, few models are able to incorporate the important influence of agricultural policy on the level of supply.