Elena Lasarte Navamuel Dusan Paredes Araya Esteban Fernández Vázquez Serie de Documentos de Trabajo en Economía - UCN https://sites.google.com/a/ucn.cl/wpeconomia Identificador: WP2012-12 Antofagasta – Agosto 2012 www.ucn.cl Avda. Angamos 0610, Pab. X10, Antofagasta, Chile Tel: + 56 55 355746 - Fax: + 56 55 355883 Documentos de Trabajo en Economía - UCN A true cost of living index for Spain using a microeconomic approach and censored data A TRUE COST OF LIVING INDEX FOR SPAIN USING A MICROECONOMIC APPROACH AND CENSORED DATA Elena Lasarte Navamuel1 Dusan Paredes Araya2 Esteban Fernández Vázquez1 Resumen Un verdadero costo de la vida (COL) mide la proporción de los gastos por mantener un nivel de utilidad para dos vectores de precios. Su aplicación y la comprobación empírica ha sido, en general, focalizada desde una perspectiva temporal. El objetivo de este trabajo es calcular un COL espacial entre las regiones de Espanha. Para este propósito se utilizaran los microdatos de la Encuesta de Hogares Presupuesto 2010 (EPF, Encuesta de PresupuestosFamiliares) proporcionado por el Instituto Español de Estadística (INE, InstitutoNacional de Estadística). Vamos a denominar a este costo Índice espacial del Costo de Vida (SCOL). Utilizamos un enfoque microeconómico que mantiene el nivel de los hogares de la constante utilidad y permite la sustitución entre las diferentes canastas de bienes a través del espacio. Los resultados revelan grandes diferencias en SCOL a través de las regiones españolas. Las estimaciones del índice de SCOL permite reconsiderar las comparaciones regionales en materia de salarios medios. Aun cuando las cifras nominales de las cuentas regionales muestran grandes disparidades regionales, las diferencias regionales son en gran parte moderada cuando las cifras salariales son corregidos por nuestra SCOL. Palabras clave: Índice espacial del Costo de Vida, AIDS, estimación en dos etapas para datos censurados, España. Código JEL: R21, C36 1 2 REGIOLab. University of Oviedo, Spain. Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile. 1 Abstract A true Cost of Living (COL) index measures the expenditure ratio of maintaining a utility level for two price vectors. Its application and empirical testing has been, generally, focalized on a temporal perspective. The aim of this paper is to calculate a spatial COL for the regions of Spain. For this purpose, we will use the microdata from the 2010 Households Budget Survey (EPF, Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares) provided by the Spanish Statistical Institute (INE, Instituto Nacional de Estadística). We will denominate this index Spatial Cost of Living Index (SCOL). This type of analysis is not usually made by the national statistical agencies and Spain is not an exception. We use a microeconomic approach that keeps the households’ level of utility constant and allows substitution among different baskets of goods across space. The results reveal large differences in SCOL across the Spanish regions. The estimates of the SCOL index allows for reconsidering regional comparisons in terms of average wages. Even when nominal monetary magnitudes for Regional Accounts show great regional disparities, regional differences are largely moderated when the wage figures are corrected by our SCOL. Keywords: Spatial cost of living index, AIDS, two-step estimation for censored data, Spain. JEL Classification: R21, C36 2 1. Introduction. A true Cost of Living (COL) index measures the expenditure ratio of maintaining a utility level for two price vectors. The COL index is broadly used as an indicator useful to asses changes in welfare: if the COL index is equal to one, then the price change does not affect the consumer surplus. Otherwise, the consumer should be compensated, namely in a positive or negative sense, in order to keep constant the level of utility. Computing a spatial version of the COL index (SCOL index) is an issue of great interest since it allows measuring expenditure differentials across regions, which have important implications for the assessment of welfare policies. This kind of analysis is not usually made by national statistical agencies where its application has been limited to a temporal perspective (Koo et al., 2000 and Molina, 1997). Comprehensive regional cost of living data are not available from a governmental source, neither for U.S. states, nor for European regions (Suedekum, 2006). Most of works use an approximation to the SCOL index, for example, the ACCRA3 index or the CPI (Koo et al., 2000; Curran et al., 2006 and Jolliffe, 2006) and, other works estimates its own SCOL index according to different approaches: (i) estimation of a regression model of the factors that explain COL in an area (Kurre, 2003), (ii) estimation of COL data from expenditure data (Voicu and Lahr, 1999); and (iii) estimation of a complete set of demand equations (AIDS) for all commodities in all places (Paredes and Iturra, 2011). While this approach is strongly grounded on the consumer theory, it is considered very complicated and typically is not operational due to data requirements. The aim of this paper is to provide an estimation of the SCOL index. The SCOL index is calculated by estimating an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) developed by Deaton and Muellbauer (1980) following a microeconomic approach, which is consistent with the consumer theory. The data are obtained from the Household Budget Survey of 2010. The AIDS estimates an expenditure function as a function of prices and a given utility level. After the parametric construction, the expenditure ratio between the average prices of two regions is directly estimated. We should keep in mind that the data available present several limitations. First, the SCOL index is calculated only for 3 American Chamber of Commerce Researchers Association. 3 the food group because we need information about physical quantities and monetary expenditure across spatial units. This information allows for recovering prices, something that cannot be achieved in the rest of the expenditure groups excepting energy products. Additional, the food group is the most important group in terms of household consumption, with an expenditure of 14.37% on total household budget. Second, our analysis only estimates the SCOL for the 17 Spanish NUTS II regions (Autonomous Communities) since the survey does not allows for more detailed spatial scale. At this geographical disaggregation level we find large differences in the SCOL across regions: the differences in cost of living between regions around 20%. The paper is organized as follows: section 2 reviews the literature on cost of living index and describes the methodology applied. Section 3 provides details about the database used for our empirical exercise for the Spanish regions. The estimation results are reported in section 4. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper with the final remarks. 2. Methodology for constructing a Spatial Cost of Living Index. The Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE) estimates the Price Consumer Index (CPI) to measure variations in prices of goods and services purchased by Spanish households. The CPI index is calculated as a chainLaspeyres index between the current period and the base period. It can be considered as an approximation of the COL, given that the CPI does not maintain a constant utility level as the COL does. In other words, the CPI is only a proxy of the true cost of living because it imposes a fixed basket of goods and services to all households in all spatial units. Keeping fixed the quantities consumed instead of the utility level generates a substitution bias derived from ignoring the substitutions made by consumers in response to price variations.4 The substitution bias is more significant in spatial comparisons than in a time series context. The reasons are (i) because transportation costs affect prices in 4 We can highlight the importance of the existing bias between the two indices taking into account the words of Allan Greenspan in 1995 before the U.S. Congress. He declared that he suspected that the Price Consumer Index overstated the Cost of Living by 0.5 to 1.5% point annually. The bias of 1.1% a year up to 2006 would generate an increase of US$ 691 billion in the public deficit (Lucia Fava, V., 2010). 4 different ways across space even in the same period of time; and, (ii) because the consumption basket is affected by geographical and weather factors (Paredes & Iturra, 2012). For these reasons, the assumption that the consumption basket is fixed across the space could be an unrealistic assumption when spatial price variations are studied. The theory of the COL was initially developed for Konüs (1924). The author focused his theory on comparing two periods of time: a household which faces two different price levels tries to adjust its commodity basket in order to maintain a constant level of utility with the minimum expenditure cost. However, due to practical reasons this approach is not the most commonly used. When instead of utility the baskets are fixed, such as in the case of CPI, the resulting index is called Axiomatic. This approach is preferred over COL because its calculation does not require estimating an expenditure function. Its main disadvantage is the existence of a potential spatial substitution bias. For example, if two prices are extremely different across space, then the consumers will change the quantity that is not captured by the axiomatic approach. This paper follows Konüs’ idea but studying price differentials across the space. Despite the vast literature on cost of living indices over time, the spatial dimension has received less attention (Desai, 1969; Howard Nelson, 1991; Timmins, 2006 and Atuesta and Paredes, 2011). For the specific case of Spain, no previous attempt of computing a SCOL has been made. In this paper this gap is covered estimating a SCOL index for Spanish regions. In order to calculate the SCOL with the economic approach we need to observe prices, quantities and a utility function. Prices and quantities are directly observable from sample data, but we cannot observe the form of the utility function. To address this problem an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS), proposed by Deaton and Muellbauer (1980), is estimated. The estimation of the AIDS is used to recover the expenditure function and to calculate the COL for the median household in each region. The analysis starts with a definition of a SCOL index between regions i and j as: 5 = and Where ̅, ̅ , , (1) are the prices paid by the reference consumer in the regions i and j, respectively. The AIDS defines a cost or expenditure function consistent with the microeconomic theory that defines the minimum expenditure necessary to attain a utility level at given prices: , = 1− log + log " (2) where c is the expenditure function, p is the price vector, u is the utility level, and log & = #$ + % # log '( log " & & 1 + % % * log 2 '( '( = log + +$ , - log (3) (4) If (3) and (4) are substituted in the cost function (2), and applying the Shepard’s lemma, the demand functions can be obtained directly from this equation: . /01 . /01 , 2 32 = , =4 (5) Where4 is the budget share of good i: & 4 = # + % * log + + +$ , '( - (6) If u is defined in (2) as a function of prices and total expenditure and substitute the result into (6), the shares are obtained as a function of p and x, 6 plus a set of parameters to be estimated. These shares are the AIDS demand functions: & + + log56⁄7 9 4 = # + % * log '( (7) Where α, β and γ are parameters of the model; 4 is the budget share of good i;6is the total expenditure on the food groups and P is a price index defined as: log 7 = #$ + ∑&'( # log + ∑&'( ∑&'( * log ( ; log (8) The parameters of the AIDS model satisfy the adding-up restriction (∑ 4 = 1), are homogeneous of degree zero in prices and total expenditure taken together, and the total expenditure satisfies the Slutsky symmetry. These properties of the demand consumer theory can be imposed in the following way: ∑&'( # = 1, ∑&'( * = 0, ∑&'( * = 0, ∑&'( + = 0 * =* (9) (10) (11) The model to be estimated in our case is a particular case of the AIDS model because it has censored data, caused by those households that report zero consumption. Not accounting for the zero consumption biases the estimation of the parameters of the model. To address the problem of biased estimation we will follow the two-step method proposed by Shonkwiler and Yen (1999) which improves a previous two-step estimation procedure of Heien and Wessells (1990). In the first step we estimate a probit regression with a dependent binary variable that represents the decision of consuming and a set of socioeconomic variables are used as regressors. The probit model determines the probability that a given household consumes a given good and it is used to estimate the cumulative (Φ) and the density (=) functions. 7 The second step incorporates the cumulative function as a scalar in the equations for shares, whereas the density function is included as an extra variable: & 4 = Φ 6 ># + % * log '( + + log56⁄7 9? + % @ AA@ + B= 6 @ (12) AA@ are dummy variables for the 17 Spanish regions (NUTS II) that Where represent unobservable heterogeneity across spatial units and idiosyncratic components; @ is a parameter associated to the regional dummy is an extra parameter associated with the density function. AA@ ; and, B The set of C– 1 equations like (11) conforms the demand system, where n is the number of shares and the last share is recovered as a residual of the remaining C– 1 ones. Once this demand system is estimated, the parameters are used to recover the expenditure function of a representative household for each spatial unit and the SCOL index defined in(1) is calculated. 3. Data. The data used in this analysis are obtained from the 2010 Household Budget Survey (EPF), a survey that provides information about Spanish household’s patterns of consumption, income and other household socioeconomic characteristics5. The data sample is formed by 22,346 observations at a household level and for the 17 regions. The AIDS is estimated for ten sub-groups belonging to the group of Food and non-alcoholic beverages in the EPF classification: (1) Bread and cereals, (2) Meat, (3) Fish, (4) Milk, cheese and eggs, (5) Oil, (6) Fruits, (7) Vegetables, (8) Sugar, (9) Coffee, tea and cacao; and (10) Mineral water and other soft drinks. The observed budget shares 4 of equation (12) for each household are calculated dividing the expenditure of the household in each of the ten food groups by the total household expenditure in food. 5 More details in http://www.ine.es/jaxi/menu.do?type=pcaxis&path=%2Ft25%2Fp458&file=inebase&L=0 8 The estimation of the AIDS requires data on prices, quantities purchased and household expenditure. A problem arising due to zero consumption is that prices are not available for all the items and all the households. Due to the fact that all the prices must be observable to estimate the AIDS system, the individual prices at which households purchase the commodities are recovered by dividing expenditures by quantities. In the cases where the quantities are not reported by a household, the price of the item is replaced by a geometric mean of the prices of this item in the same region, distinguishing if this item is purchased by a household situated in a capital city or not. In the first case, the price is replaced by the average price of the same item in the same capital city. In the second case, the price is replaced by the average price of the item in the region. This procedure to determine missing prices implies that the households that do not consume an item are facing the average commodity prices. Although the household expenditure is the main variable in the survey, the EPF also recovers other socioeconomic variables (size of the household, sex, marital status and age of the head household, income level and education level) that will be used to estimate the probit model in the first step of the process. It is assumed that these characteristics influence the decision of consuming a particular good. 4. Estimation and results. The estimates of the probit model for the first step of the Shonkwiller and Yen (1999) methodology are shown in Appendix 1. A binary variable which represents the decision of consumption of each of the ten food groups of the data sample is regressed as a function of the socioeconomic variables described in section 3, demographic variables represented as region dummies, population size of the municipality and one dummy which takes the values of 1 if the household is situated in a capital city and 0 otherwise. The results of the probit model are used to calculate the cumulative (B) and the density (=) functions included in the estimation of the AIDS. The parameters of the model are estimated by applying Nonlinear Seemingly Unrelated Regression that fits a system of nonlinear equations by Feasible Generalized Nonlinear Least Squares (FGNLS). The parameters 9 estimated are shown in Appendix 2. These estimates are necessary to recover the expenditure function (2) for the representative household in each region and, then this expenditure function is used to calculate the SCOL. As a representative household we take the household with the median income in each region. The results of the SCOL are shown in Table 1. Table 1.The Spatial Cost of Living Index by regions. REGION SCOL ANDALUCIA ARAGON ASTURIAS BALEARES BASQUE COUNTRY CANARY ISLANDS CANTABRIA CASTILLA LA MANCHA CASTILLA LEON CATALONIA EXTREMADURA GALICIA LA RIOJA MADRID MURCIA NAVARRA VALENCIA 0.915 0.971 0.929 0.960 1.093 1.019 0.964 0.835 0.900 1.082 0.912 0.917 0.981 1.000 1.008 1.093 0.979 The region of Madrid is taken as reference, which explains why the index for Madrid takes the value 1. The results are sorted in alphabetical order, showing the smallest value (0.835) in Castilla-La Mancha and the highest one (1.093) in the Basque Country and Navarra. The results could be interpreted as follows: the cost in food products required to attain the same utility level for the median households in Madrid is around 17% higher than the equivalent household in Castilla-La Mancha, for example6. Similarly, is 9.3% lower than in the Basque Country and Navarra. Differences in the COL seem to be quite relevant among regions, especially if we take into account the relative small size of the country and the proximity between some pairs of regions. A positive correlation is observed between the COL estimated and the regional dynamics, since the most developed regions in Spain (Catalonia, the Basque Country and Navarra) 6 Note that differences in consumption patterns are allowed between these two households, provided that their utility level is the same. 10 are those that present the highest SCOL indices. In these regions the cost of food products is higher than in the region of Madrid, which is the region with the largest city of Spain. Even when large city sizes are normally linked to higher incomes and, consequently, higher costs, one should bear in mind that the results are only observable at the NUTS II level. In other words, the results are just an average of all the households living in the region of Madrid, which comprises Madrid City but much smaller towns and villages as well. Catalonia, the Basque Country and Navarra do not contain such a large city as Madrid, even when Barcelona in Catalonia or the metropolitan area of Bilbao in the Basque Country are considerably large. However, they are regions that comprise many more urban areas on average than the region of Madrid. Furthermore, these regions are located in the so-called Ebro-Axis, which is the area with the most developed Spanish regions, traditionally. One interesting exception is the case of the Canary Island, where the cost in food products is estimated to be larger than in Madrid. Even when this could be somehow surprising, since Canary Island are considered as relatively poor within Spain, this could be an consequence of higher transport costs. 5. Concluding remarks: some implications on regional economics. Economic indicators of regional income do not normally take into account geographical differentials in cost of living. Not adjusting these nominal indicators and transforming them into real values inevitably yields misleading results. For example, policies designed to alleviate regional income disparities that do not consider potential geographical differences in cost of living could result in benefits to regions that in real terms would not need these benefits. As an illustrative example, Table 3 shows the average wages across regions in nominal terms for 20107 and the same values when they are adjusted by the estimated SCOL. 7 Information on regional wages can be founded at: http://www.ine.es/jaxi/menu.do?type=pcaxis&path=/t22/e308_mnu&file=inebase&N=&L=0 11 Table 3.Nominal and adjusted wages in 2010 by regions. REGION ANDALUCIA ARAGON ASTURIAS BALEARES CANARY ISLANDS CANTABRIA CASTILLA LEON CASTILLA LAMANCHA CATALONIA VALENCIA EXTREMADURA GALICIA MADRID MURCIA NAVARRA BASQUE COUNTRY LA RIOJA Nominal Wage 18,839 20,623 20,691 19,708 17,552 19,459 18,205 19,272 23,871 19,575 17,795 18,815 25,785 18,744 22,862 25,596 21,127 Wage adjusted by SCOL 20,580 21,236 22,273 20,526 17,224 20,178 20,228 23,071 22,056 19,998 19,508 20,513 25,785 18,591 20,914 23,419 21,527 Second column shows the average wage per worker in 2010 according to the Regional Accounts disseminated by INE. The last column to the right shows these same values but adjusted by the SCOL index estimated in the previous section, i.e., expressed in equivalent Euros of Madrid. By applying this adjustment is relatively easy to detect that the regional disparities in wages are considerably lower. For example, the mean wage in Madrid in 2010 was approximately 37% higher than in Andalucia; however if differences in cost of living are corrected by using the estimated SCOL, this difference is only of 25%. The possibility of making such analysis is the main motivation for this paper, which proposes a cost of living index for the case of Spain. Although the Consumer Price Index is the usual measure taken as reference for quantifying changes in cost of living, it cannot be considered a true cost of living index because it suffers from a variety of conceptual and practical problems. Our Spatial Cost of Living Index (SCOL) is based on microeconomic foundations and is estimated from an Almost Ideal Demand System in order to maintain constant the level of utility of the consumer instead of fixing the basket. The estimation of the AIDS considers the potential bias generated by zero consumption observations, a very usual in the expenditure surveys. Using this methodology the expenditure ratio is calculated for two representative consumers in two different spatial units. While most of the literature has 12 computed the cost of living index over time, we computed the index in a spatial context where a substitution bias problem due to the heterogeneity of the consumers belonging to different spatial units. The empirical results, using food microdata of the Spanish Household Budget Survey for 2010, show huge differences in cost of living across regions. Our estimates show that the difference between the most expensive and the cheapest region, Basque Country and Castilla La Mancha, respectively, is more than26%.These differences in the SCOL provide some new insights when wage differences across the 17 NUTSII regions are analyzed. The results are undoubtedly limited, since they only study differences in cost of living regarding food –due to data availability-, but allow for comparing living standards across regions from a different perspective, not commonly considered in traditional regional analysis. 13 14 Appendix 1: Probit estimation for censored consumption Share1 Share2 Share3 Share4 Share5 Expenditure 0.0956*** 0.4184*** 0.5976*** 0.4344*** 0.3317*** Stratification Level 0.0192*** -0.0643*** -0.0588*** -0.0389*** -0.0672*** Household Size 0.4471*** 0.2687*** 0.1859*** 0.2910*** 0.2240*** Number of Employed -0.0435*** 0.0661*** 0.0215*** -0.0952*** -0.0051*** Head Age 0.0015*** 0.0093*** 0.0135*** 0.0046*** 0.0065*** Head Sex 0.0167*** 0.0146*** 0.0127*** 0.0339*** 0.0107*** Head Marital Status 0.0065*** 0.0091*** -0.0274*** -0.0118*** -0.0100*** Education Level -0.0915*** -0.0818*** -0.0461*** -0.0303*** -0.0513*** Municipality Size -0.0181*** -0.0811*** -0.0165*** -0.0470*** -0.0395*** Capital of Province 0.0003 0.0288*** 0.0099*** 0.0203*** 0.0003 Andalucia -0.0194* 0.0356*** 0.4222*** 0.1613*** 0.2780*** Aragon 0.0370*** 0.0352*** 0.4058*** 0.2057*** 0.1826*** Asturias -0.2127*** -0.1673*** 0.1519*** 0.1410*** -0.0843*** Baleares -0.0291*** -0.0169* 0.0194*** 0.1414*** -0.0027 Canarias 0.0292*** -0.0416*** 0.0882*** -0.0102 0.1470*** Cantabria 0.1461*** 0.2914*** 0.5006*** 0.2764*** Castilla-León 0.1624*** 0.0135* 0.2635*** -0.0164* -0.0869*** Castilla-La Mancha 0.1851*** -0.1087*** 0.1872*** -0.0129 -0.2003*** Cataluña -0.0039 -0.0462*** 0.1040*** 0.1609*** 0.0641*** Valencia -0.1055*** -0.0392*** 0.1775*** -0.0440*** -0.1864*** Extremadura -0.2004*** 0.0259*** 0.3508*** 0.0877*** 0.3017*** Galicia 0.3446*** 0.2021*** 0.2996*** 0.4242*** 0.0175*** Madrid -0.0249** 0.0428*** 0.4208*** 0.1733*** 0.3379*** Murcia -0.0503*** 0.1610*** 0.3648*** 0.1368*** 0.2952*** Navarra 0.0468*** -0.1298*** 0.0782*** -0.3568*** -0.0831*** Pais Vasco 0.1554*** 0.0246*** 0.1782*** 0.0613*** 0.0735*** La Rioja 0.0267** Ceuta y Melilla -0.3618*** 0.3226*** -0.0977*** 0.2836*** Madrid City -0.1373*** 0.0420*** 0.3402*** 0.0633*** 0.2350*** Constant 0.5872*** -3.0732*** -5.7930*** -3.0416*** -3.3013*** (1) *, ** and *** represent the level of significance to 10%, 5% and 1%, respectively. (2) Number of observations 16261421 (weighted). 15 Share6 Share7 Share8 Share9 Share10 0.4575*** 0.4716*** 0.3895*** 0.3755*** 0.2810*** -0.0374*** -0.0866*** -0.0750*** -0.0488*** -0.0472*** 0.1854*** 0.2660*** 0.2511*** 0.2177*** 0.2771*** -0.0135*** -0.0461*** -0.0002 0.0121*** -0.0113*** 0.0169*** 0.0098*** 0.0024*** 0.0045*** -0.0085*** 0.0302*** 0.0290*** 0.0142*** 0.0148*** -0.0019*** -0.0536*** -0.0315*** 0.0157*** 0.0051*** 0.0137*** 0.0054*** 0.0349*** -0.0001 -0.0239*** -0.0447*** -0.0585*** -0.0791*** -0.0365*** -0.0309*** -0.0735*** 0.0152*** 0.0097*** 0.0194*** 0.0135*** 0.0110*** 0.5216*** 0.4443*** 0.1767*** 0.4110*** 0.5427*** 0.4487*** 0.3648*** 0.1676*** 0.2763*** 0.1972*** 0.0685*** 0.0752*** 0.0174*** -0.0046 -0.0272*** 0.3482*** 0.3735*** 0.1014*** 0.0311*** 0.4978*** 0.3232*** 0.1685*** 0.2359*** 0.3316*** 0.7011*** 0.1183*** 0.1144*** 0.1631*** 0.2114*** 0.2203*** 0.3737*** -0.0297*** -0.1611*** -0.1375*** -0.1226*** 0.2976*** 0.2206*** -0.1429*** -0.0737*** 0.1423*** 0.3965*** 0.3315*** 0.0426*** 0.0795*** 0.3759*** 0.1883*** 0.3188*** -0.0849*** -0.0653*** 0.3191*** 0.2380*** 0.1680*** 0.3296*** 0.5185*** 0.3672*** 0.2436*** 0.1485*** 0.0754*** 0.0049 0.0708*** 0.6353*** 0.3948*** 0.1264*** 0.2695*** 0.4389*** 0.2889*** 0.2508*** 0.1743*** 0.4004*** 0.4882*** 0.0979*** 0.2015*** -0.0260*** 0.0596*** -0.1745*** 0.2330*** 0.1584*** 0.1333*** 0.0120*** -0.1767*** 0.1119*** 0.0703*** 0.1851*** 0.3375*** 0.4579*** 0.6053*** 0.3559*** 0.1921*** 0.3031*** 0.3485*** -4.2029*** -3.8425*** -3.7123*** -4.0518*** -1.7106*** Appendix 2: Coefficients of the Almost Ideal Demand System. Coeff. ( ; 0.00125*** #( #; Coeff. 0.0042*** +( +; Coeff. -0.0660*** *(( *(; Coeff. 0.0665*** -0.0440*** +E #E *(E -0.0200*** E + # * -0.0101*** F F F (F + # * -0.0011*** G G G (G +H #H *(H -0.0010*** H +I #I *(I -0.0008*** I +J #J *(J 0.0010*** J +K #K *(K 0.0015*** K *;; 0.0374*** ($ *;E 0.0163*** (( *;F -0.0096*** (; *;G 0.0026*** (E *;H 0.0077*** (F *;I -0.0013*** (G *;J -0.0014*** (H *;K -0.0004*** (I * 0.0056*** (J EE *EF 0.0001*** *EG 0.0012*** *EH -0.0014*** *EI 0.0077*** *EJ 0.0000*** *EK -0.0001*** *FF 0.0242*** *FG -0.0018*** *FH 0.0013*** *FI -0.0008*** *FJ -0.0010*** *FK -0.0010*** *GG -0.0039*** *GH 0.0037*** *GI -0.0010*** *GJ -0.0014*** *GK 0.0009*** *HH -0.0097*** *HI -0.0034*** *HJ 0.0019*** *HK 0.0022*** *II -0.0063*** *IJ 0.0009*** *IK 0.0020*** *JJ 0.0030*** *JK -0.0020*** *KK -0.0032*** (1) *, ** and *** represent the level of significance to 10%, 5% and 1%, respectively. 0.00121*** 0.00143*** 0.00157*** 0.00091*** 0.00125*** 0.00127*** -0.00007*** 0.00110*** 0.00049*** 0.00283*** 0.00080*** 0.00251*** 0.00190*** 0.00194*** 0.00232*** 0.00134*** 0.00377*** 0.3775*** 0.2498*** 0.0959*** 0.0514*** 0.0770*** 0.0811*** 0.0043*** 0.0172*** 0.0610*** 0.0560*** -0.0174*** 0.0110*** 0.0044*** -0.0013*** -0.0043*** -0.0009*** 16 B( B; BE BF BG BH BI BJ BK Coeff. -0.0202*** 0.2578*** 0.2617*** 0.1525*** 0.0642*** 0.2262*** 0.1170*** 0.0146*** 0.0223*** References ASHOK V DESAI (1969) A Spatial Index of Cost of Living. 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