| New information about food safety can stimulate a sudden, significant concern by the public, resulting in a pronounced change in consumer demand. One such example is the declining level of beef consumption in Europe and Japan, stemming from the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), known as mad-cow disease. This study evaluates the impacts of the BSE outbreak in Japan in September 2001 on the import demands for U.S. meat in Japan and South Korea, using a nonparametric revealed preference approach. Empirical results show that there are excess violations in the Japanese data after the timing of the outbreak, but not in the South Korean data, implying that the event has influenced Japanese meat import demand, but not South Korean meat import... |
