As consumer confidence improves and real incomes start to rise, consumption growth will gain strength over 2012.

Industry officials believe, however, that consumption growth will soon recover and that new techniques will be needed to produce even more shrimp.

In general, a low value of theta (high intertemporal elasticity) means that consumption growth is very sensitive to changes in the real interest rate.

A high theta implies an insensitive consumption growth.

In general, the formula for calculating the amount of time left for a resource with constant consumption growth is:

"Real personal consumption growth in technology went from an 80 percent rate in 1999 to 35 percent right now," he said.

And consumption growth has been relatively resilient.

Then solving the above dynamic equation for consumption growth we get:

Under alternative measures proposed in the study, the serial correlation of consumption growth is found to be positive.

"That will take personal consumption growth well below the 3 percent pace we've been cruising at during the last couple of quarters."