Household Demand for Fresh Potatoes: A Disaggregated Cross-Sectional Analysis

A model of household fresh potato consumption incorporating prices, income, family size and other socioeconomic effects is estimated by maximum likelihood Tobit procedures. The effects of truncation bias due to non-purchasing households are evaluated and decompositions of the Tobit elasticities are performed for various sub-groups of the data. The market devel-opment implications of this type of disaggregated commodity analysis are explored. The use of socioeconomic variables to augment the more traditional money in-come specification of household food ex-penditure functions from cross-section data has been increasingly accepted. Price et al. and others have focused upon ex-penditure function analysis for broad food aggregates incorporating socioeconomic and demographic factors. Adrian and Daniel, Allen and Gadson and others have focused upon the impact of household so-cioeconomic characteristics on selected food nutrients. In more commodity spe-cific frameworks, Price et al. (fruits and vegetables), Huang et al. (whole and low-fat fresh milk), and Capps and Love (fresh vegetables) have demonstrated the ex-planatory usefulness of socioeconomic variables for disaggregated cross-sectional analysis. Most food consumption analysis of cross-section data derives from traditional con-The authors are respectively Research Associate an