Karel Janda

The Estimation of Czech Food Import Demand System: the Almost Ideal Demand System Approach to Food Demand Karel Janda

This book deals with a neoclassical descriptive microeconomic analysis of Czech food import demand. It presents a set of import demand elasticity estimates which could be used in economic analysis and in building structural models of the Czech economy. Since the data on which the estimation is based cover the early stages of the Czech economic transition, the estimated elasticities could be used as an approximation of import demand elasticities in modeling other transition economies. The import demand elasticities provided in this book are based on the AIDS demand system approach with inclusion of the economic theory based restrictions of homogeneity, symmetry, and negativity. Important feature of this book is an inclusion of the original TSP computer code for data manipulation and for estimation of AIDS model consistent with economic theory together with appropriate statistical testing. This book was reviewed by Michal Franta, PhD (Czech Central Bank).