Impact of socio-economic and demographic factors on willingness to pay for food safety attributes
Xhevat Sopi
University of Gjilani “Kadri Zeka”, Kosovo
xhsopi@yahoo.com
Engjëll Skreli
Agricultural University of Tirana, Albania
eskreli@ubt.edu.al
Abstract
Growing demand by customers in many countries for higher level of food safety, as a reflection of the food safety incidents and problems, has resulted in an expression of willingness to pay a premium price for increased food safety. In many studies, the willingness to pay more for safer food is presented as a function of socio-economic and demographic factors, such as: income, education level, gender, age, family structure, residence, information for food safety problems etc.
The aim of this paper is to determine whether the dairy customers in Kosovo are willing to pay a higher price for certified products on food safety and which is the impact of socio-demographic factors in WTP. For this purpose, a survey of 303 customers of Viva Fresh Store supermarket network was conducted – the customers were interviewed at the time of purchase, inside the supermarket at the dairy products sector, namely white cheese, milk and yogurt. The survey took place from April 1 to May 5, 2015, in three cities representing three groups of cities by number of inhabitants: Pristina, with over 100 thousand inhabitants, Gjilan in the group with 50-100 thousand inhabitants and Vitia with less than 50 thousand residents.
Logit Binary model was applied to analyse the results and test the hypothesis, which showed that the level of education, the level of incomes and the families with preschool children have a significant impact (p<0.05) in WTP. Other tested factors such as: the age, gender, residence (city-village), the number of family members, pensioners and the number of children in schools (6-17 years) in the families didn’t show a significant impact (p>0.05). The results are important for the managers of milk processing industry as well as for state institutions.
Keywords: willingness to pay; food safety; socio-demographic factors; logistic regression; Kosovo