Assesment of Trends in the Share of Expenditure on Services and Food in the Visegrad Group Member States

Abstract

The subject of the article concerns changes in the structure of consumption in the Visegrad countries in the years 1996-2016. The focused was on expenditure on services and food expenditure of households in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. The systematic improvement of the socio-economic situation and institutional changes in the Visegrad Group countries resulted in an increase in expenditure on services and food. This contributed to changes in the structure of household consumption, where the share of expenditure on services in final expenditure increased in the examined period in each of the countries studied, and the share of expenditure on food systematically decreased. The main research objective of the article is to identify trends in the share of household expenditure on selected types of goods in their final expenditure. The different trends in the shaping of expenditure shares for goods considered in the article result from their different nature, where services are a higher order good, while food is a good satisfying basic existential needs of man. The study also attempted to determine the limit values of the share of expenditure on services and the share of expenditure on food in the structure of household consumption in selected countries. The limit values were determined for both types of goods on the basis of estimation of parameters of the Tӧrnquist function of the first type. The limit values established in the study should be treated as the saturation level for the share of goods that the countries are able to achieve with the current trends in their socio-economic development.