Analysis of Fruit Consumption in the U.S. with a Quadratic AIDS Model

The Quadratic AIDS model was estimated to analyze the U.S. fruit consumption using annual per capita consumption data and prices for a demand system consisting of fresh fruit, fruit juice and other processed fruit. All Marshallian own price elasticities are found to be negative and the demand system is dominated by complementarity relationships. Both own and cross price Marshallian elasticities are less than one. Fruit juices are found to be expenditure elastic conditional on the total expenditure on fruits while fresh fruits and other processed fruits are found to be expenditure inelastic. However, fresh fruit is close to being unitary expenditure elastic. After allowing for curvature in the Engel function, U.S. fresh fruit demand is found to be more responsive to changes in income than in previous studies