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Nancy Cheng 4A (6)
Recently, The “Shanghai Mien” restaurant have cause a lot of food poisoning incident.
About 120 of Hong Kong citizen suffered from this. “Shanghai Mien” is still being closed as more and more people are discover to have food poisoning.
Food and Environmental Hygiene Department discovers that there is a virus in the food that “Shanghai Mien” restaurant provided. The restaurant has not suitably processed live food with ripe food and hence causing diseases. Since SARS, Hong
Kong people are much concerned about the environmental problem, but still some of them were not.
In economics, RAI MIEN and fried rice are substitutes, they can be replaced by each other. They are both economic goods. Since there is some virus found in RAI MIEN, people are afraid of it, and the demand of RAI MIEN will falls. At the same time the demand of the substitutes’ fried rice will increase (Fig.2) In order to attract more consumers, producers will try to increase the supply of fried rice.
Since many people suffered form the food poisoning, people afraid of getting virus; also, the “Shanghai Mien” restaurant was being closed for a long time, both demand and supply decrease. In normal condition, falls in demand will cause the equilibrium price to falls, and falls in supply will cause the equilibrium price rise. But now, the condition is that, the fall in demand is greater than the decrease in supply, so the price will decrease a little bit. (Fig.1)
In conclusion, the changes in demand and supply were caused by other factor but not price. “Shanghai Mien” should process the lives and ripe food suitably so that the food is clean and is healthy for consumers. Then they can increase their income.
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