engleski

Sociodemographic patterns of household consumption in Croatia: a descriptive review

Demographic changes in developed countries affect economic processes and impact contemporary economic paradigm on virtually all levels. Interest in research dealing with the relationship between consumption and demographic change has increased in the last two decades. Significant body of literature states the clear and robust impact of demographic change on volume and structure of consumption. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence from micro-perspective, especially for Croatia. The aim of this paper is to study the main sociodemographic characteristics that shape the consumption patterns in Croatia. Since no comparable research on this topic exists for Croatia, we conclude our research from a descriptive standpoint. We used microdata from Croatian Household Budget Survey. The datasets we used provide rich information on consumption from household level. To analyze the correlation of main socioeconomic variables with consumption volume we employed methodology used in comparable research: studying single households. Also, we grouped households by age, size, income, composition and other variables of interest to study the differences in consumption. The consumption was measured in monetary value on annual level to mitigate seasonality. Our descriptive findings provide first insights into identifying key sociodemographic patterns of household consumption in Croatia. Our results indicate that older households have different consumption patterns than young households. Also, results lead us to assume that regional differences in Croatia also exist, but location variables were not available in the dataset so we could not support it with clear empirical results. Datasets we used limited our results in terms of analyzing a broader set of sociodemographic variables since most of the dataset is oriented towards household level.

demographic change, ageing, household consumption, demography

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