Determinants of municipal-level household food waste

Abstract

This research investigates the long-run determinants of per capita food waste, using a monthly time series dataset collected from the Taipei City Food Scraps Recycling Program, covering a span of 19 years. In addition, this research introduces a new proxy for the food wastage rate, gauged by the ratio of edible-to-inedible food scraps. The results of time-series cointegration analysis show that per capita edible food scraps and socioeconomic factors are bound together over the long run. Specifically, per capita edible food waste displays a positive co-movement with food price, the working-age share, and household size, while exhibiting a negative co-movement with the old-age share. This insight empowers policymakers with the ability to foresee and tackle the food waste problem by acting on the municipality's demographic and economic structural change. Our analysis complements the existing studies that depend on cross-sectional individual-level data by adopting a long-run municipal-level time series perspective. [EconLit Citations: Q11, Q13, Q18, D1].