Estimating the income of meat consuption in Brazil employing panel data

Abstract

This article tried to estimate the impact that the average monthly household income has on the human consumption of beef, pork and poultry in nine Brazilian metropolitan areas. For this, it was calculated the coefficients of the income elasticity for the human consumption of these types of meat, by using panel data. The data are from Brazilian Household Income Survey (POF) collected in 1987/88, 1995/96 and 2002/03 by IBGE.. The fresh beef, followed by pork, stew meat and chicken, was the one that had the highest rates of the income elasticity in general. This shows that the fresh beef and the pork have the greatest potential for the growth of consumption than the others, in case the income of the Brazilian population increases. The use of panel data, with fixed effects and time for the calculation of the income elasticities, enabled  to capture possible differences in the consumption of the studied meat in the nine surveyed metropolitan areas and checked if there was any change in the pattern of meat consumption over the time.