Price Adjustment of Essential Commodities and the Welfare of Urban and Rural Households of Iran

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Abstract

This paper wants to answer to the question "what is the equivalent amount of money for compensating welfare loss of households through price adjustment of bread, rice, oil and sugar?" We cluster urban and rural households based on homogeneity of consumption behaviors and estimating Linear Approximate Almost Ideal Demand Systems (LA\AIDS) for different clusters, and also calculate welfare indices (equivalent income, compensated variation and the cost of living index). The %100 price adjustment of bread, increase the cost of living of urban cluster1 households by %11.86 , and for the same rural households the figure will be %15.63