Demand for Health, Recreation and Education

This chapter discusses the demand for another group of commodities consisting of health, recreation and education. Rising household income levels, changing demographic composition in countries with noticeable population aging and an increasing level of international and local travel facilitated by rapidly growing transport, health, education and recreation sectors have become important considerations in household budget allocations. The chapter present some preliminary data analysis of the price and consumption data of health, education and recreation by presenting budget shares, consumption and price growth rates using Divisa indices and the relationship between consumption and prices using a number of scatter plots. A majority of the cross-price elasticities presented in columns are positive, indicating that health, recreation and education are pairwise substitutes in a number of countries. However, in a small number of countries, the cross-price elasticities are negative, revealing some level of complementarity between the three commodities.