Generic Promotion of Agricultural Products: Balancing Producers' and Consumers' Needs

Farmers sponsor generic advertising campaigns to expand the total market for their commodity. Generic advertising promotes a type of food, such as milk, beef, or orange juice, rather than a specific company's brand. Sales promotions may help increase consumer demand and raise—or at least stabilize—commodity prices. If producers can improve their domestic markets through generic advertising, some pressure on price supports and other traditional farm policy tools could be relieved. The growth in promotions has spurred public debate about the costs and benefits for producers, and the effect on food budgets and choices for consumers. Do producers gain from advertising, and if so, do consumers pay the price in their food bills

Economic Well-Being and Household Size: Alternative Ways of Analyzing Demographic Information on Households

In this report... Researchers use income distribution to measure the economic well-being of the population. However, analyzing how much better off one household is than another is difficult because there are many factors to consider in order to present an accurate picture. One major obstacle in comparing the well-being of households of different sizes is deciding on the appropriate way to adjust household income so that all households, regardless of size, are on an equal level in the study. For example, does a four-person household require twice as much income as a two-person household to be equally as well-off? In this report, we examine some alternative ways of adjusting household income to compare welfare across different sized households and demonstrate that the demographic characteristics(such as age, race, sex) of the poorest and richest households can vary greatly with the type of adjustment method selected

Effects of Advertising on the Demand for Cheese, January 1982-June 1989

Increased advertising raised natural cheese sales by about 21 million pounds and processed cheese sales by about 193 million pounds during September 1984- June 1989. These sales were for cheese consumed at home. Declining real prices of natural cheese increased sales by about 566 million pounds. Increasing real incomes raised natural cheese sales by 379 million pounds and increased processed cheese sales by about 10 million pounds. An assessment of 15 cents per hundredweight of milk sold commercially, mandated by the Dairy and Tobacco Adjustment Act of 1983, funded the advertising. The authors used estimated econometric demand models to simulate these results

Effects of Advertising on the Demand for Cheese and Fluid Milk

An advertising campaign raised fluid milk sales by about 5,975.4 million pounds during September 1984-September 1990. Natural and processed cheese (consumed at home) sales rose by about 23 and 229 million pounds in the same period. An assessment of 15 cents per hundredweight of milk sold commercially, mandated by the Dairy and Tobacco Adjustment Act of 1983, funded the increase in advertising. The authors use econometric demand models to introduce variables that would offset or complement dairy-centered advertising. In both branded and generic advertising, changes in market price, income, and the availability of substitute goods are factors that influence the demand for natural and processed cheese