Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on international consumption comparisons of food, alcohol and tobacco, clothing, housing, durables, health, transport, communication, recreation, education, restaurants and miscellaneous across a number of developed and developing countries. It describes the time-series consumption and price data for 45 countries and summarises data using the tools. The book discusses the system-wide approach to estimate the three differential demand systems and obtain the income and price elasticities for the commodity groups in 45 countries. Changing demographic composition in countries with noticeable population aging and an increasing level of international and local travel facilitated by rapidly growing income and transport facilities means that the health, education and recreation sectors have become important considerations in household budget allocations. In particular, we estimate income, own-price and cross-price elasticities for different commodity groups and commodities within specific groups.