Regional Difference in Food Consumption Away from Home of Urban Residents: A Panel Data Analysis

China's economy has been developing rapidly and people's living standards have improved during the past decades.. With the acceleration of modern life rhythm and change of consumption concept, the food consumption pattern of urban residents has changed largely. Urban Households begin to pursue nutritious, fresh, convenient and fast food, and dining out becomes a consumption fashion. The overall goal of this paper is to better understand food-away-from-home (FAFH) consumption in urban China. We use a secondary panel data food consumption of urban residents at the provinces (municipalities) level to examine the trends in FAFH during 2000-2008. Particularly, we use fixed effects regression model to analyze the main factors through which people's food-away-from-home expenditure and regional propensity to consume are affected. We find that, nowadays income is the most important socio economic factors that determine the food-away-from-home consumption of urban residents, and people's FAFH consumption is highly elastic, the income elasticity of FAFH is higher in the low income group than that in the medium and high income group. Additionally, people's consumption propensity towards dining out in western China is somewhat higher than that in eastern and central regions in China. FAFH high-income elasticity provides a good indicator for FAFH demand.