The Analysis of Consumer Demand in Russia: Two-Stage Construction of Analytical Indexes

Abstract

The article develops methods for constructing analytical («economic») indices, and their application in the analysis of consumer demand in Russia based on official statistics on the consumption of goods and services (468 items for the period 2012–2017). The «economic» direction of indexology, which is based on the use of consumer demand theory, when constructing prices indices and measuring consumption dynamics, takes into account consumer preferences instead of the subjective biases of statisticians or authors of various index formulas. This direction has a long history, dating back to the 1924 work of the Soviet economist A.A. Konüs. The development of this concept in the works of Western researchers refers only to individual or household demand due to the absence of market demand theory in neoclassical Economics. Such a holistic theory of market demand was developed in recent years in the works of V.K. Gorbunov, and on this basis were developed methods for constructing analytical indices, using the ambiguity of restoring the utility function from a finite set of data for the variant determination of indices with characteristics, namely optimistic, pessimistic, and objective.To compare the traditional and «economic» directions of indexology, the authors constructed Laspeyres, Paasche and Fischer price and quantity indices. The indices were calculated both for the summary statistics of prices and consumption of the population, and for the main groups of consumer goods: food products, non-food products and services. General (two-stage) indices of all types were constructed for group indices and the consistency in aggregation property was tested. The obtained results are a new example of a successful verification of the holistic market demand theory.