Demand for Fresh Vegetables in the United States: 1970–2010

This paper analyzes a demand system for eight major fresh vegetables in the USA using the most recently available dataset (1970–2010). A first-differenced Linear Approximate Almost Ideal Demand System (LA-AIDS) is applied to estimate price and expenditure elasticity of demand, imposing homogeneity and symmetry restrictions. We find that not only are consumers responsive to changes in own-prices but they also respond significantly to changes in prices of other fresh vegetables that are consumed together. Conditional budget share allocation to lettuce, cabbage, and celery has declined, while the share of the consumer dollar going to tomatoes, peppers, and onions has increased over the period. Except for cabbage, all own-price elasticity estimates are negative, less than unity in absolute value, and statistically significant. About half of the 56 cross-price elasticities are negative and significant, indicating high, albeit asymmetric, complementarities among these fresh vegetables. Expenditure elasticities are positive and significant for all but one of these eight vegetables. Over the period under consideration, demand and expenditure elasticities remained fairly stable.