The first-difference version of a source-differentiated almost ideal demand system is used to estimate demand for Ivorian rice imports. The results indicate that Thailand will benefit most from an expansion of imports of luxury rice and broken rice products. Vietnam will gain from growth in the market for standard rice. The results also suggest that adoption of a new 35 percent tariff policy to protect the domestic industry will not be enough to improve social welfare in Côte d'Ivoire in spite of increased production value.

Using annual Japanese fresh fruit import data from 1971 to 1997, this study analyzes the import patterns of Japan's seven most popular fresh fruits by implementing and testing a general differential demand system that nests four alternative import demand specifications. When tested against the general system using the five-good case (bananas, grapefruits, oranges, and lemons and aggregating pineapples, berries, and grapes), the analysis rejects the Almost Ideal Demand System and National Bureau of Research specifications but does not reject Rotterdam and Central Bureau of Statistics models. When estimated using the six-good case (bananas, grapefruits, oranges, lemons, and pineapples and aggregating berries and grapes), the analysis rejects all specifications except the Rotterdam model.

This paper examines Chinese consumer preference for major animal products and assesses the potential impacts of a reduction in China's import tariff on its pork and poultry demand and net import. Our analysis suggests that China's demand for animal products will continue to grow as income increases. Using a trade model, results of our scenario analysis indicate that a reduction in China's import tariffs will significantly increase its net pork and poultry imports and the U.S. will capture most of the increases. Nevertheless, the impact on the market price in China and the U.S. is likely to be very small.

Consistent real income comparisons over time and space are critical for studies on catch-up and convergence. The paper provides an analytical framework for making real income comparisons across countries and over time that satisfy transitivity and at the same time reflect an underlying nonhomothetic utility function for a representative consumer. The concept of reference price comparisons is developed and implemented using nonhomothetic translog and almost ideal demand systems. The paper discusses a direct approach, which uses all the parameters of the demand system to make real income comparisons, and an indirect approach, which adjusts the national price-based comparisons using reduced information only on income elasticities of demand. The proposed approach is empirically implemented using data from the 1980 and 1996 benchmark data from the International Comparison Program, and the empirical results confirm the analytical results discussed in the paper.

This paper focuses on the demand for money in the United States in the context of five popular locally flexible functional forms—the generalized Leontief, the basic translog, the almost ideal demand system, the Minflex Laurent, and the normalized quadratic reciprocal indirect utility function. We pay explicit attention to the theoretical regularity conditions of positivity, monotonicity, and curvature and argue that much of the older empirical literature ignores economic regularity. We treat the curvature property as a maintained hypothesis and provide a comparison in terms of violations of the regularity conditions and in terms of output in the form of a full set of elasticities. We also provide a policy perspective, in that a strong case can be made for abandoning the simple sum approach to monetary aggregation, on the basis of the low elasticities of substitution among the components of the popular M2 aggregate of money.