Consumption of salt rich products in the UK: impact of the reduced salt campaign

This paper makes use of a leading UK supermarket’s loyalty card based data which records information on purchase decisions by consumers who shop at its stores in order to assess the effectiveness and impact of the UK reduced salt campaign. We present an empirical analysis of consumption data to assess the effectiveness of the UK Food Standard Agency’s (FSA) ‘reduced salt campaign’ on the basis of information on health related announcements undertaken by the FSA under its ‘low salt campaign’. We adopt a general approach to determining structural breaks in consumption data, including making use of minimum LM unit root tests whereby structural breaks are endogenously determined from the data. We find evidence supporting the effectiveness of the FSA’s reduced salt campaign.

[1]  P. Perron,et al.  Lag Length Selection and the Construction of Unit Root Tests with Good Size and Power , 2001 .

[2]  Junsoo Lee,et al.  Stationarity of health expenditures and GDP: evidence from panel unit root tests with heterogeneous structural breaks. , 2003, Journal of health economics.

[3]  H. Kinnucan,et al.  Seasonality in the Consumer Response to Milk Advertising with Implications for Milk Promotion Policy , 1986 .

[4]  P. Perron,et al.  Computation and Analysis of Multiple Structural-Change Models , 1998 .

[5]  M. Mazzocchi,et al.  Consumer Welfare and the Loss Induced by Withholding Information: The Case of BSE in Italy , 2004 .

[6]  J. Stock,et al.  Testing for and Dating Common Breaks in Multivariate Time Series , 1998 .

[7]  Junsoo Lee,et al.  Minimum LM Unit Root Test with Two Structural Breaks , 1999 .

[8]  P. Perron,et al.  Estimating and testing linear models with multiple structural changes , 1995 .

[9]  J. LaFrance.  The structure of US food demand , 2008 .

[10]  D. Andrews.  Tests for Parameter Instability and Structural Change with Unknown Change Point , 1993 .

[11]  L. Fulponi,et al.  Private voluntary standards in the food system: The perspective of major food retailers in OECD countries , 2006 .

[12]  Kurt Hornik,et al.  Testing and dating of structural changes in practice , 2003, Comput. Stat. Data Anal..

[13]  J. Bai,et al.  Estimation of a Change Point in Multiple Regression Models , 1997, Review of Economics and Statistics.

[14]  Hermann Simon,et al.  Diffusion and Advertising: The German Telephone Campaign , 1987 .

[15]  Serena Ng,et al.  Unit Root Tests in ARMA Models with Data-Dependent Methods for the Selection of the Truncation Lag , 1995 .

[16]  Kurt Hornik,et al.  Monitoring Structural Change in Dynamic Econometric Models , 2002 .

[17]  Junsoo Lee,et al.  Nonrenewable Resource Prices: Deterministic or Stochastic Trends? , 2005 .

[18]  Mario Mazzocchi,et al.  Five-a-day, a price to pay: an evaluation of the UK program impact accounting for market forces. , 2011, Journal of health economics.

[19]  Achim Zeileis,et al.  Validating multiple structural change models. An extended case study. , 2005 .

[20]  O. Johansson-Stenman.  Mad cows, terrorism and junk food: should public policy reflect perceived or objective risks? , 2008, Journal of health economics.

[21]  E. Golan,et al.  Food product composition, consumer health, and public policy: Introduction and overview of special section , 2008 .

[22]  Donald R. Lehmann,et al.  The Long-Term Impact of Promotion and Advertising on Consumer Brand Choice , 1997 .

[23]  D. Andrews,et al.  Further Evidence on the Great Crash, the Oil-Price Shock, and the Unit-Root Hypothesis , 1992 .

[24]  Mohammed Mohsin,et al.  PPP tests in cointegrated panels: evidence from Asian developing countries , 2004 .

[25]  Mark C. Strazicich,et al.  Minimum Lagrange Multiplier Unit Root Test with Two Structural Breaks , 2003, Review of Economics and Statistics.