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EMPIRICAL REGULARITIES IN CONSUMPTION PATTERNS IN EMERGING ECONOMIES
Author(s) -
CHEN Dongling,
CLEMENTS Kenneth W.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
the developing economies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.305
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1746-1049
pISSN - 0012-1533
DOI - 10.1111/j.1746-1049.1996.tb00739.x
Subject(s) - chen , consumption (sociology) , empirical research , citation , sociology , library science , computer science , statistics , social science , mathematics , paleontology , biology
objective of this paper is to use data on disaggregated consumption pat-terns in a number of emerging/developing economies to identify severalimportant empirical regularities. Rather than proceeding on a commodity-by-commodity basis, we mainly adopted a systemwide approach to analyze theconsumption basket as a whole. In a similar way, we also analyzed the countries inquestion as a group in seeking to identify patterns in consumption behavior whichseem to be widely applicable.It is generally recognized that economic data in many of these countries are notexcellent. As The Economist of March 4, 1995 puts it: “Governments in rich coun-tries are often accused of publishing ropey economic statistics. Yet the quality oftheir numbers shines in comparison with those churned out in some emergingeconomies.” That article also refers to an ofcial investigation in China in 1994that identied “60,000 instances of false statistics on a range of indicators includ-ing output, income, investment and ination.”