Determination of factors that affect willingness to consume milk types and food expenditures in Turkey

This research carries two main objectives. First is to present impacts of household and household head related socio-demographic and economic factors on milk and milk types expenditures probabilities, consumption quantity and willingness to pay levels both with organic and conventional milk in Turkey. Second is to find factors that affect household's food expendure so that we can identify consumption patterns according to regions. Research sample size consists of 7 areas 14 provinces in Turkey and first hand cross sectional data have been obtained from 1570 household interviews. Socio-demographic and economic factors of households and household heads have been found important statistically on expenditure probabilities. In addition, willigness to pay for consumption quantity have been obtained for street, conventional and organic milk as follows. While households who live in Mediterranean and Aegean area accept respectively extra 63 and 40 kurus, for conventional and organic milk households in Aegean area accept extra pay respectively 77 kurus and 1,87 TL. When we look at the results of Contingent Valuation (CV) for conventional and organic milk types, we see vital market potential for street and organic milk that might be taken into consideration by investors and stakeholders. If investors take these economic market values as a reference, profit might be inevitable. When it comes to second objective of the study, we analyzed factors shaping five food expenditure types and found that most factors affecting food expenditure types found statistically significant across food expenditure types. These results may shed light on effective policy formation for decision makers in Turkey.