Acta Univ. Agric. Silvic. Mendelianae Brun. 2013, 61(2), 437-444 | DOI: 10.11118/actaun201361020437

Alternative indicators of living standards and household consumption expenditure in a global perspective

Milan Palát, Alois Kunc
Department of Territorial Studies, Mendel University in Brno, Zemědělská 1, 613 00 Brno, Czech Republic

The paper deals with identifying relationships between the household consumption expenditure and the human development index (HDI) on the sample of countries of the world. It provides an analysis of the HDI and the household consumption expenditure and on the basis of available statistic data carries out evaluation of the correlation analysis between household consumption expenditure and HDI in six groups of countries: developed countries, countries of the former eastern bloc, countries of the Near East, countries of South East Asia, Latin American countries and African countries. With respect to results of the analysis, statistically significant dependences were found between the development of household consumption expenditure per capita and HDI. At countries of the former eastern bloc, the dependence is always statistically significant but it does not reach such intensity. At African and some Latin American countries, the dependence is already statistically insignificant. Thus, we can summarize that with decreasing GDP per capita the dependence of the household consumption expenditure development on HDI weakens. In this respect, the validity of a hypothesis is also verified that household consumption expenditure is correlated to the HDI development at the global comparison on the more heterogeneous sample of countries than any other analyses published so far.

Keywords: human development index, household consumption expenditure, correlation analysis, global comparison
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The paper was prepared thanks to the support from MSM 6215648904 "Česká ekonomika v procesech integrace a globalizace a vývoj agrárního sektoru a sektoru služeb v nových podmínkách evropského integrovaného trhu".

Received: January 4, 2013; Published: April 24, 2013  Show citation

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Palát, M., & Kunc, A. (2013). Alternative indicators of living standards and household consumption expenditure in a global perspective. Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis, 61(2), 437-444. doi: 10.11118/actaun201361020437
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