Modelling the Consumption of Home-Produced Vegetables with an Application to French Households.

The purpose of this paper is to study the trade-off between purchases and home production of food. We develop a simple household production model which predicts a zero elasticity of home production with respect to total expenditure. Focusing on vegetables, we use data from the 1991 French National Food Survey. Due to data limitations, a reduced form of the structural household production model is estimated. We use Working-Leser functional forms for the share of vegetables in total food consumption and the share of home production in vegetable consumption, conditional on the decision to maintain a kitchen garden. As predicted by the theoretical model, we estimate a zero elasticity of home production with respect to total vegetable outlay. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.