The demand for alcohol in the United Kingdom

Using the AIDS model, we show that there exists for the UK a stable long-run relationship between expenditure shares on beer, cider, spirits and wine, alcohol prices, total alcohol expenditure and a range of non-economic variables relating to advertising, licensing, the employment, social class and demographic characteristics of consumers, and climate. Our estimates of key price and income elasticities generally lie between those found from other time-series studies (which exclude most of these non-economic variables) and those found from cross-section studies (which generally include them). However, the restrictions required for separability, homogeneity and symmetry (although not those for perfect price aggregation) are decisively rejected.