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

摘要

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.