In this study, we estimated the influence of different meat prices, socio-demographic and geographic variables on sheep and goat meat demand using the Swiss household expenditure survey from 2000 to 2005, a micro data set on 20,940 households resident in Switzerland. This study is motivated by the fact that sheep and goats play a major economic role especially for small farms in Swiss agriculture and contribute to conservation of landscape and biodiversity especially in the mountain regions. Considering the high share of households with zero consumption for sheep and goat meat, we estimated a Tobit-model. Missing prices are replaced by monthly, regional market prices where possible, or by quality adjusted prices based on unit values. Our results show that pork is a substitute for sheep and goat meat, whereas beef is a complementary good, and that socio-demographic variables like education or the presence of children and geographic variables are important in determining demand of sheep and goat meat.

In this study, we estimate final demand for beverages with a particular focus on alcoholic beverages and calculate elasticities using microdata from the Swiss household expenditure survey from 2000 to 2009, which containsdata from more than 34,000 households. We estimate price and income responses for three household segmentslight, moderate, and heavy drinking householdsto assess whether higher alcohol consumption could be described by different price and income elasticities in comparison to lower alcohol consumption. We obtain unconditional estimates by applying a two-stage budgeting quadratic almost ideal demand system. To generate missing price data, we used the recently proposed quality adjusted price approach. Due to a high share of zero consumption for some beveragescategories,we correct the model with a two-step estimation procedure. Estimation results show that heavy drinking households are much less price elastic with respect to wine and beer in comparison to moderate or light drinking households, while the price response for spirits is almost constant over the three segments. Before implementing a new tax for alcoholic beverages in Switzerland, the social, health, and economic effects of a rather small decrease in alcohol consumption among heavy drinking households must be weighed against possible negativeconsequences of a sharp decline in light or moderate drinking households.

No abstract