Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Are nutritional claims an adequate tool for public health? Evidence from food purchases in France

Contents:

Author Info

  • Caillavet, France
  • Nichele, Veronique
  • Soler, Louis-Georges
Registered author(s):

    Abstract

    Nutritional claims have become a major instrument for providing consumers with information at the point of purchase, enabling them to make nutritionally appropriate choices. This paper deals with two public policy issues linked to the implementation of nutritional claims, i.e. efficiency and equity, in terms of nutritional outcomes and in terms of population targeting. We consider the French breakfast foods market at the household level using 2004 TNS Worldpanel data. We estimate a demand system taking into account the selection issue. For this we use the Shonkwiler and Yen’s procedure which, unlike Heckman’s, allows participation on every market of products to be controlled for. We propose a modification of this approach to address the methodological issue of satisfying the additivity constraint. This procedure is estimated on a set of dairy and cereal-based products which have different health attributes. Our results show that products with health claims play the role they are expected for. The light variants of dairy foods considered here appear to target households with members at health risk, obese or overweight. But interactions between products suggest some limits to efficiency on nutritional grounds. A higher probability of purchasing light products and with higher quantities coincides with higher purchases of biscuits and dairy desserts. Moreover, since lower income discourage the use of products with health claims, equity is not obtained and this should be stressed for policy implications.

    Download Info

    If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
    File URL: http://purl.umn.edu/44007
    Download Restriction: no

    Bibliographic Info

    Paper provided by European Association of Agricultural Economists in its series 2008 International Congress, August 26-29, 2008, Ghent, Belgium with number 44007.

    as in new window
    Length:
    Date of creation: 2008
    Date of revision:
    Handle: RePEc:ags:eaae08:44007

    Contact details of provider:
    Email:
    Web page: http://www.eaae.org
    More information through EDIRC

    Related research

    Keywords: Nutritional claims; Food policy; Healthy diet; Censored Demand system; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety;

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    References

    References listed on IDEAS
    Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
    as in new window
    1. Diansheng Dong & Brian W. Gould & Harry M. Kaiser, 2004. "Food Demand in Mexico: An Application of the Amemiya-Tobin Approach to the Estimation of a Censored Food System," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 86(4), pages 1094-1107.
    2. J. Scott Shonkwiler & Steven T. Yen, 1999. "Two-Step Estimation of a Censored System of Equations," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 81(4), pages 972-982.
    3. Heien, Dale & Wessells, Cathy Roheim, 1990. "Demand Systems Estimation with Microdata: A Censored Regression Approach," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 8(3), pages 365-71, July.
    4. Harald Tauchmann, 2005. "Efficiency of two-step estimators for censored systems of equations: Shonkwiler and Yen reconsidered," Applied Economics, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 37(4), pages 367-374.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Lists

    This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:eaae08:44007

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (AgEcon Search).

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

    If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.