The Demand for Food and Calories

Shankar Subramanian and Angus Deaton

Journal of Political Economy, 1996, vol. 104, issue 1, 133-62

Abstract: The authors investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural Maharashtra in India. They estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0.3-0.5, a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom. The elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living and is far from the value of zero suggested by a recent revisionist literature. In these Indian data, the calories necessary for a day's activity cost less than 5 percent of the daily wage, which makes it implausible that income is constrained by nutrition rather than the other way around. Copyright 1996 by University of Chicago Press.

Date: 1996
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Working Paper: The Demand for Food and Calories (1994)
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