A differential approach is employed to analyze demand for meat in the United Kingdom during 1989-99. Differential demand systems with fixed price effects (Rotterdam and CBS) better explain consumers' retail purchase allocation decisions for beef, lamb, pork, bacon and poultry compared with models containing variable price effects (NBR and differential AIDS). The real expenditure and the Hicksian demand elasticities are generally found to be quite different from earlier studies using AIDS models. A quality change index of meat consumption is constructed from the estimated CBS model estimation results and decomposed into real expenditure, substitution, trend, seasonal and residual effects.
