82 – Contributed Poster Presentations: Government Statistics Section
Updating Demand Elasticities by Means of Administrative Records
Luis Frank
Universidad de Buenos Aires
The article presents a method based on linear programming to estimate and update demand elasticities. The method is particularly useful for updating estimates of elasticities by means of administrative records. In fact, the author uses this method to update the elasticities of 47 classes of items (more than 95% of the consumption basket of Argentine households) through tax records and to compute new estimates that satisfy conditions of homogeneity and aggregation imposed by the economic theory on demand systems. The new elasticities are used to compute demand indices which in turn are compared with their counterparts from the supply-side of the National Accounts System in order to evaluate the performance of the updating method.