Abstract
This paper uses a leading UK supermarket’s loyalty card database to assess the effectiveness and impact of the 2004 UK reduced salt campaign. We present an econometric analysis of purchase data to assess the effectiveness of the Food Standard Agency’s (FSA) ‘reduced salt campaign’. We adopt a general approach to determining structural breaks in the time series of purchase data, using unit root tests whereby structural breaks are endogenously determined from the data. We find only limited evidence supporting the effectiveness of the FSA’s reduced salt campaign. Our results support existing findings in the literature that have used alternative methodologies to examine the impact of information campaigns on consumer choice of products with high salt content.
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Notes
By convention, \( i_{0} = 0\;{\text{and}}\;i_{m + 1} = n. \)
Results have been obtained using R and the package strucchange.
More detailed results for individual series such as TS1 (crisp.lowsalt) and TS10 (butcher- schoice.baconS) and all complete results are available from the authors.
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Acknowledgements
Research funded by the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA Project Code: D03008). We would also like to acknowledge help received from Andrew Fearne in obtaining the dataset used in this paper.
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Sharma, A., di Falco, S. & Fraser, I. Consumption of salt rich products: impact of the UK reduced salt campaign. Int J Health Econ Manag. 19, 341–357 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10754-018-9257-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10754-018-9257-9