HOUSEHOLD DEMAND FOR FISH AND MEAT PRODUCTS: SEPARABILITY AND DEMOGRAPHIC EFFECTS

By reviewing the current demand literature for fish and meat, it is apparent that several inadequacies arise from the problems of market delineation or aggregation errors. Inappropriate aggregation may lead to biases in price elasticities and associated specification problems with respect to identifying substitutes. Formal separability tests allow for identification of appropriate aggregation levels and the relevant products or market boundaries in a systematic manner. A formal demand system for fish and meat can thus be estimated with one data set over various aggregations with the appropriate demographic arguments. The present article tests for separability (and thus relevant substitutes/complements) by estimating different demand systems over different aggregation levels for fish and meat with an identical retail level household data set for the Canadian market.