AGGREGATION WITHOUT SEPARABILITY: TESTS OF U.S. AND MEXICAN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION DATA

The generalized composite commodity theorem (Lewbel 1996) is used to test for consistent aggregation of U.S. and Mexican agricultural production data in each of the categories for which earlier tests rejected homothetic separability. All U.S. agricultural outputs can be justifiably aggregated into as few as four categories. All Mexican agricultural outputs can be aggregated into as few as five categories. The aggregation of all outputs into a single output cannot be supported in either country by sufficient conditions provided by the generalized composite commodity theorem and/or a homothetically separable technology.