Abstract
Personal consumption is usually viewed as the major factor determining the standard of living of a population. Furthermore, to borrow Janet Chapman's phrase, it is “one of the grand criteria on which the performance of [an] economy will be judged.” To facilitate such an evaluation of East European economies, which have been operating to the present on the principles of Soviet-type planning, we have assembled in this paper the results of a statistical investigation of personal consumption in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Following the principle that context and comparison alone bring out meaning, we have selected those aspects that lend themselves most naturally to international confrontation: rates of growth and absolute levels of per capita consumption, changes in the relative share of personal consumption in total output, and changes in the structure of consumption by major categories.
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