The Effect of Food Safety and Quality on the Consumption and Price of Meat in Beijing, China
Abstract
China's economic success has helped it become one of the largest markets in the world. As a result, the demand for agricultural commodities in China has experienced a significant increase. Increasingly affluent Chinese people are paying increasing attention to food safety and quality instead of just quantity. Understanding how meat demands and prices are related to food safety and quality in Beijing will provide guidance for industry and policymakers interested in the Chinese meat market. The purpose of this study is to develop two models to analyze meat demand and prices associated with food safety and quality respectively. First, An Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) is used to investigate the effects of food safety on meat consumption. To address the potential bias of zero consumption in the estimation procedures, a simulated maximum likelihood (SML) estimation is applied in the regression. Second, we analyze the
implicit price of meat with the intrinsic and extrinsic attributes using a hedonic price model. Five meat categories are regressed on several intrinsic and extrinsic attributes in the model using household survey data collected in Beijing in 2007. The key results of this research have two major outcomes. First, food safety has a significant and positive influence on meat consumption for Beijing residents. Second, the
quality-related attributes or characteristics such as meat appearance, supermarket, meat brand, and processed meat as well as demographic variables such as household head's income have a significantly positive influence on the price of meat, which suggest that the consumers in Beijing are willing to pay a price premium to guarantee the quality and safety of meat.