An analysis of the relationship between income and proteins consumption

Chapter 2 Economic drivers of dietary changes: a literature review Although I will not explore determinants of food choices other than the economic ones, it is important to note that many drivers infuence the eating behaviour of a person, a group of people or a nation. Food consumption is affected by a range of factors including food availability, food accessibility, geography, demography, income, urbanisation, religion, culture and consumer attitudes. In the literature the following determinants of food choices have been found : biological determinants such as hunger, appetite, and taste; physical determinants such as access, education, skills (e.g. cooking) and time; social determinants such as culture, family, peers and meal patterns; psychological determinants such as mood, stress and guilt; attitudes, beliefs and knowledge about food. The infuences are so many and interrelated that the task to identify all of them is complicated. The economic analysis of food choice has a long history, “dating back at least to the work of Ernst Engel in the mid-nineteenth century” (Young et al. 1998, p. 81). The economic approach to choices is based on the concept of an individual attempting to maximise his welfare by choosing the preferred outcome from a limited set of options: consumer choice is constrained, principally, by a limited resources (budget constraint) and also by other factors, such as time availability and the legal and institutional framework and the prices in the marketplace. The consumer's problem is to fnd the most preferred affordable commodity bundle (maximise utility) subject to the constraints. The demand for a particular food product, in a given time, given tastes and preferences, depends on the price of the product, the prices of all other food and non- food products and income (Young et al., 1998). The focus of this chapter is on economic drivers because they are specifcally related to the nutrition transition. In the empirical analysis that will follow only the income (per capita) will be taken into consideration. 2.1. Food price elasticity The most commonly used measure of consumers' sensitivity to price is known as price elasticity of demand. It is the ratio of the percent change in the quantity demanded to 13