Understanding the Impacts of Food Consumer Choice and Food Policy Outcomes

Jayson Lusk and Jill McCluskey

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 2018, vol. 40, issue 1, 5-21

Abstract: The food consumer plays an increasingly prominent role in shaping the food and farming system. A better understanding of how public policies affect consumer choice and how those choices impact health, environment, and food security outcomes is needed. This paper addresses several key challenges we see for the future, including issues related to dietary-related diseases and the efficacy of policies designed to improve dietary choices, trust in the food system, acceptance of new food and farm technologies, environmental impacts of food consumption, preferences for increased food quality, and issues related to food safety. We also identify some research challenges and barriers that exist when studying these issues, including data quality and availability, uncertainty in the underlying biological and physical sciences, and the challenges to welfare economics that are presented by behavioral economics. We also identify the unique role that economists can play in helping address these key societal challenges.

Keywords: Demand; environment; food choice; health; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aepp/ppx054 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:apecpp:v:40:y:2018:i:1:p:5-21.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy is currently edited by Timothy Park, Tomislav Vukina and Ian Sheldon

More articles in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().