Socio-Economic Status and the Structural Change of Dietary Intake in Hungary

Abstract

Typically, big changes in the economic system lead to alterations on families’ disposable income and thus on their spending for different types of products, including food. These may imply in the long run a structural modi􀁬 cation of the population’s diet quality. After the fall of the socialist system, in the past two decades, Central and Eastern European countries, including Hungary, went through a profound and sometimes dif􀁬 cult transition of their political and economic systems, shifting from a centralized plan to an open-market economy, and, perhaps more importantly, the European Union integration. Economic change in lower-income and transitional economies of the world appears to coincide with increasing rapid social change. With respect to nutrition, there is evidence that these countries are changing their diets and that changes seem to happen at a faster pace than ever before (e.g. Ivanova et al., 2006). In this paper, we analyse the evolution of Hungarian dietary patterns based on socio-economic status (SES) data between 1993 and 2007. Data allows defining and profiling several clusters based on aggregated consumption data, and then inspecting the in􀁭 uence of SES variables using OLS and multinomial logit estimations.