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SEASONALITY AND ELASTICITY OF THE DEMAND FOR FOOD IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE DERATIONING
Author(s) -
BROWN J. A. C.
Publication year - 1959
Publication title -
journal of agricultural economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.157
H-Index - 61
eISSN - 1477-9552
pISSN - 0021-857X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1477-9552.1959.tb02167.x
Subject(s) - economics , imperfect , econometrics , disadvantage , income elasticity of demand , price elasticity of demand , microeconomics , computer science , philosophy , linguistics , artificial intelligence
Summary. Such figures as have been presented in this paper are best regarded as means, often imperfect, of summarising detailed information on the history of price and quantity movements which would otherwise be difficult if not impracticable to assimilate. The advantage of presenting such results for a large number of items is that they tend to reinforce each other and to reveal cases which have individual peculiarities, but the disadvantage is perhaps that too little information can be presented on individual items for any specialised interest. In particular, for the purpose of predicting the future trend of demand or prices of individual commodities any mechanical application of the income and price elasticities here presented would involve the risk of appreciable error. For such a purpose purely econometric studies of past periods form but a small part of the information available to the forecaster, and should perhaps be regarded as the one‐tenth of the iceberg which appears above the surface of the water.