Assessing the Effect of the Rise in Food Prices on the Purchasing Power of Consumers in Scotland

C Revoredo-Giha*, PMK Leat, BE Kupiec-Teahan, C Lamprinopoulou-Kranis, L Cacciolatti

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Book/Report/Policy Brief/Technical BriefResearch reportpeer-review

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to present an analysis of the effect of the rise of food prices on the purchasing power of Scottish consumers. It should be
noted from the start that the fact that no aggregate consumer price index is computed for Scotland, forces us to use indirect estimates. Due to this, the
analysis is divided into two parts. The first part combines UK price information by items, the average household expenditure for all items for Scotland from the Expenditure and Food Survey, the expenditure distribution by deciles for the UK and information about the evolution of household income categorised by gross income deciles, in order to explore how the rise in prices has affected the real income (i.e. purchasing power) of the different Scottish income groups. The second part of the report explores the question of how different is the evolution of Scottish prices from average UK prices (as the first part of the study assumes that Scottish and UK prices evolve in similar ways), using information from the dunnhumby database (representative supermarket data). As it is not possible to compare the evolution of all prices for all the goods and services that comprise the UK aggregate consumer price indices (i.e., Consumer Price Index or Retail Price Index), the analysis considers 12 selected food categories: brown and white bread, skimmed, semi-skimmed and whole milk, salmon (fresh and chilled), white fish, fresh apples, fresh eggs, fresh new potatoes, minced beef and whole fresh chicken.
Original languageEnglish
PublisherScotland's Rural College (SRUC)
Commissioning bodyScottish Government
Number of pages36
Publication statusPrint publication - 2010

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