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411 – Regulatory Challenges in Nonclinical Biostatistics
Review of Household Demand Elasticities in Argentina
Luis Frank
University of Buenos Aires
Sebastian Maggio
University of Buenos Aires
Demand elasticities are widely used in economic studies to predict the demand for goods. In recent years several studies have estimated price and income elasticities of household goods consumed in Argentina. However, the review of these papers shows that (a) virtually all estimates come from the Survey of Household Expenditure of 1996 (ENGHo'96) and, therefore, do not reflect changes in consumers' behavior after the country moved towards a flexible currency exchange rate, (b) demand functions other than LINQUAD and log-log have not been explored, which - in our view - do not represent correctly the demand for all goods consumed by the population, and (c ) despite sharing a common information source and, in many cases, the same functional form, the resulting estimates are highly variable between studies. For these reasons, we review the already computed demand elasticities and compare them with updated estimates from ENGHo'04 data. Therefore we propose specific demand functions for each article and a simple aggregation procedure in order to cover all items consumed by the population.