Abstract
Engel’s law states that food is not a luxury. This is one of the earliest empirical regularities in economics and also one of the most robust. The widespread finding is that regressions of food expenditures, quantities or budget shares on income or total expenditure and other variables such as prices, demographics and regional dummies uniformly imply that the income elasticity of food is less than 1 (and greater than zero). For example, time series from individual countries, cross-sections within countries and cross-country analyses all find the same qualitative empirical finding.
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Deaton, A., and J. Muellbauer. 1986. On measuring child costs: With applications to poor countries. Journal of Political Economy 94: 720–744.
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Browning, M. (2018). Engel’s Law. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_681
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_681
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-95188-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-95189-5
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