The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether consumers in Scotland's remote areas suffer from food prices that are higher than the average national prices (i.e., whether a “remoteness premium” exists). The question has been raised by several organizations in those communities looking at the high prices in local stores. This paper provides a new perspective using actual purchasing prices of a sample of 5,252 households in Scotland for 2017 and 2018. In this way, households' ability to shop for lower prices is considered, unlike in previous studies. An expensiveness index was computed to measure the expensiveness of food at household level and control for differences in quality. It showed that consumers in remote areas pay a small premium (0.3 to 0.4 percent) with respect to average prices, which is statistically significant but economically not relevant. To understand the effect of several factors, AHEI was regressed on a number of explanatory variables including local area characteristics and household demographics and consumers' shopping strategy. The results were used to simulate three hypothetical scenarios related to impact of changes in the population's age, access to discount stores, and social deprivation on food expensiveness.

中文翻译：

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苏格兰偏远地区的食品价格：家庭食品采购分析☆

本文的目的是调查苏格兰偏远地区的消费者是否遭受高于全国平均价格的食品价格（即是否存在“偏远溢价”）。这些社区的几个组织提出了这个问题，他们关注的是当地商店的高价。本文使用 2017 年和 2018 年苏格兰 5,252 户家庭样本的实际购买价格提供了一个新视角。与以往的研究不同，通过这种方式，考虑了家庭以较低价格购物的能力。计算了一个昂贵指数来衡量家庭层面的食品价格并控制质量差异。它表明，偏远地区的消费者比平均价格支付了少量溢价（0.3% 至 0.4%），这在统计上显着但在经济上不相关。为了解多个因素的影响，AHEI 对多个解释变量进行了回归，包括当地特征和家庭人口统计数据以及消费者的购物策略。结果用于模拟三种假设情景，这些情景与人口年龄变化、进入折扣店和社会剥夺对食品价格的影响有关。