Over the Great Recession real wages stagnated and unemployment increased. Concurrently, food prices rose sharply, outstripping growth in food expenditure, and leading to a reduction in calories purchased. This has led to concern about rising food poverty. We study British households to assess how they adjusted to changes in the economic environment. We show they switched to cheaper calories; implying food consumption was smoother than expenditure. We use longitudinal data to quantify the way households lowered their per calorie spending, and show they done this in part by increasing shopping effort, and without lowering the nutritional quality of their groceries.
Authors
CPP Co-Director, IFS Research Director
Rachel is Research Director and Professor at the University of Manchester. She was made a Dame for services to economic policy and education in 2021.
Research Fellow University of Wisconsin
Martin, previously Deputy Research Director, is a Research Fellow at IFS and Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin.
Research Fellow London School of Economics
Kate is an IFS Research Fellow and an Assistant Professor at LSE, interested in public finance, industrial organisation and applied microeconomics.
Report details
- Publisher
- Centre for Economic Policy Research
Suggested citation
R, Griffith and M, O'Connell and K, Smith. (2014). Shopping around? How households adjusted food spending over the Great Recession. London: Centre for Economic Policy Research. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/shopping-around-how-households-adjusted-food-spending-over-great-recession (accessed: 23 April 2024).
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