This paper summarizes household-expenditure patterns in the United States based on the 1980, 1990, and 1997 Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CEX). The CEX data used in the analysis have been organized to make them as comparable as possible to data extracted from corresponding expenditure surveys in...

This paper is the UK contribution to the consumption project. In it, we examine changes in the allocation of household expenditure across different goods and services over the past two decades using the UK Family Expenditure Survey (FES). Over time, households have increased the share of their...

Engel curves suffer from the fact that habit or addiction effects are not taken into account on cross sections. Also, income effects may differ between social groups, and cross-section parameters may be biased relatively to time-series estimations. We propose to estimate dynamic Engel curves on...

We use input-output techniques to assess the contribution of patterns of final demand and consumption to the differing employment rates observed across six industrialized economies. The key concept utilised is the employment generated economy-wide in supplying each product or service to final...

The paper shows that the growing employment gap between Europe and the USA over recent decades reflected the failure of services-employment rates in Europe to converge to American levels whilst European employment rates in goods production were falling rapidly towards those of the USA. The...

We examine in detail the changes in household expenditures patterns, and in particular services related expenditures, in the Netherlands over the years 1979, 1989 and 1998. Using Engel curve estimations, these changes are related to changes in household demographics, employment, the budget and...