SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS AND THE STRUCTURAL CHANGE OF DIETARY INTAKE IN HUNGARY: A PANNEL STUDY

Typically, big changes in the economic system lead to alterations on the disposable income of families and thus on their spending for different type of products, including food. These may imply, in the long run, a structural modification of the quality of diet of the population. After the fall of the socialist system, in the past two decades Central and Eastern European countries, including Hungary, went through a profound, and sometimes difficult transition of their political and economic systems, shifting from a centralized planned economy to an open market economy, and more importantly, the European Union integration. Economic change in lower-income and transitional economies of the world appears to coincide with increasing rapid social change. With respect to nutrition there is evidence that those countries are changing their diets and that these changes seem to be happening at a faster pace than ever before. In this paper we analyze the evolution of Hungarian dietary patterns based on socio-economic status (SES) data between 1993 and 2007. Data allows to define and profile several clusters based on aggregated consumption data, than to inspect the influence of SES variables using OLS and multinominal logit estimations.