Food deserts and location economics

Donald Vitaliano

SN Business & Economics, 2022, vol. 2, issue 2, 1-15

Abstract: Abstract People who must travel more than one mile to purchase fresh and healthy food are defined by the US Department of Agriculture as living in a ‘food desert’. An extensive literature has evolved on the subject, but it lacks an economic model or empirical evidence to explain food deserts. This paper estimates an economic location model to explain the occurrence of 4066 ‘food desert’ census tracts in 363 urban areas. The model determines the radius of a circular market area of the smallest profitable supermarket in each area, based on shoppers’ travel cost, household food purchases, and supermarket fixed costs. The model parameters are estimated for each urban area, and the mean radius is 3.25 miles, which suggests the present food deserts one mile definition is not well-grounded since the average distance in a circular market is 2/3 its radius. The number of food desert census tracts is very sensitive to the market size radius of the smallest supermarkets, with an elasticity of − 4.17, and the presence of a Walmart increases the count of food deserts by 20.

JEL-codes: D12 I3 L81 R32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s43546-021-00183-1

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