Possibilities of the analysis of demographic characteristics of consumers on the basis of the facts from the survey about household consumption

Abstract

Household Consumption Survey has been done according to current methodology following EUROSTAT suggestions since 2003. The structure of the data obtained with the household consumption diary gives us significant opportunities to investigate demographic features of consumers, i.e. households as observation units for researching preferences of consumers of different social-demographic population categories. Although the data published in HCS regard only the structure of households' consumption and households' income related both to territorial and urban-rural division of Serbia, there are possibilities for this data to be cross-analysed with different demographic, social and economic characteristic of subjects observed. Therefore, consumers' characteristics according to education, marital status, economic activity, profession, and above all according to sex and age can also be observed. As consumption structure is discussed, important notice is that the consumption has been looked at as the aggregation of each household member's consumption, where values of demographic characteristics refer to the head of that household. HCS provides a number of other possibilities for analysing demographic characteristics of population that are not in regard to consumption, such as continuous analysis of changes in marital or educational structure. .