LANSING – According to Anderson Economic Group’s monthly AndCan®Index, demand for legal cannabis products in the United States continued to climb in November 2019. AEG’s experts produce this monthly measurement by closely following 50 state trends for both the recreational and medicinal marijuana markets. Monthly calculations are based on benchmarks developed when AEG first began assessing the market in 2015.
While the legal cannabis market showed steady 2019 growth through July, August and September numbers softened slightly before demand continued to increase through October and November. Strong growth continues to be indicated year-over-year, with a rate of 16.4%.
Kenan Cosguner, Anderson Economic Group’s lead analyst for this market, is confident that the upward trend will continue in the long term, with an increase in demand forecast for the final month of 2019 and well into 2020. “We do not anticipate any significant changes to the demand trajectory at this time,” says Cosguner, “but we do expect to see the occasional bump in growth as markets continue to open and both retail sales and regulatory mechanisms become normalized.”
The AndCan®Index has been published monthly since June, 2017. Followers of the U.S. legal cannabis market may also be interested in a new publication that describes the model and the challenges that had to be overcome to develop it. Patrick L. Anderson’s “Blue smoke and seers: measuring latent demand for cannabis products in a partially criminalize market” is available online now in the journal Business Economics.
Launched in June 2017, the AndCan®Index reflects observed demand from U.S. states that have legalized cannabis, and estimates latent demand in states where data on observed demand are unavailable. The National Association of Business Economists recently recognized the superior quality of this work by awarding Patrick L. Anderson a 2019 “Best Contributed Paper” award for the manuscript “Blue Smoke and Seers: Measuring Latent Demand for Cannabis Products in a Partially Criminalized Market.” This paper, now available online in the journal Business Economics, documents the methodology and challenges faced in development of the AndCan®Index.
The AndCan®Index builds upon:
Comments from other professional economists have been incorporated into the AndCan®Index, as has additional research by Anderson Economic Group consultants.
In March 2019, Anderson Economic Group released the 2019 benchmarked AndCan®Index, which included a number of methodological and data improvements. They added data for a number of states that were not included in the original index, and updated the AndCan® methodology to take advantage of new data.
