The paper investigates the persistence of beef and buffalo meat consumption in 30 countries. We use two measures of persistence, autoregressions and fractional integration. The results indicate very heterogeneous behaviour across countries with some positive and negative trends and some countries displaying mean reversion while others show a lack of it. Nevertheless, the results reveal strong persistence in beef and buffalo meat consumption across OECD countries, with most autoregressive and fractional parameters exceeding 0.5. The persistence is especially pronounced in Japan, Germany, Italy, and Spain, whereas countries such as New Zealand and the Netherlands show faster mean reversion. These findings suggest that changes in meat consumption habits evolve slowly over time, reflecting structural, cultural, and geographical factors. Consequently, long-term policies should be accorded priority in the process of reducing beef and buffalo meat consumption for health or environmental reasons.
Gil-Alana et al. (Fri,) studied this question.