Using linear regression model to investigate the relationship between people's average expenditure on food consumption and GDP per capita in China under pandemic across cities

Abstract

The Food and Beverage (F&B) industry in China has always been a hot industry and it has experienced a continuing rise in revenue across years before the pandemic hits China’s cities. Given the large scale of the industry, its performance is closely related to people’s everyday lives. However, ever since China entered the pandemic and placed restrictions on citizens’ mobility, significant drops in the revenue have been seen in the F&B industry. A considerable number of physical restaurants had to close, and people’s food consumption has been largely affected. Moreover, in view of the different population size of provinces, it is also important to analyse the relationship between average expenditure on food consumption and GDP per capita across time.  Therefore, it is important to analyse the factors related to the F&B industry and to understand the extent of damage on the F&B industry by the pandemic. In this paper, we recognized the large extent of damage and measured it using the linear regression model, after proving the strong linear correlation between F&B industry revenue and the GDP of the city. We also analysed the linear relationship between average expenditure on food consumption and GDP per capita. The Analysis of Covariance Test is used to measure the closeness of this relationship between the years 2019 and 2020. Due to the complexity of the F&B industry, we considered another possible factor; the average age of the workforce, and introduced the multiple linear regression model.