THE RELATIVE INCOME HYPOTHESIS‐A CROSS COUNTRY ANALYSIS

Balvir Singh and Ramesh C. Kumar

Review of Income and Wealth, 1971, vol. 17, issue 4, 341-348

Abstract: This paper presents an attempt to examine the applicability of the relative income hypothesis (RIH) in terms of its various specifications proposed by Duesenberry, Duesenberry, Eckstein and Fromm (DEF), Davis and the authors (MD). Using the time series data for 1951 through 1968 the analysis has been carried out for Canada, Finland, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Japan, Philippines, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States. It is found that RIH provides a fairly good representation of the consumption behaviour of all the countries included in the study. All specifications, however, do not perform equally well. DEF and Davis functions score the maximum points; MD comes at par with DEF in case of Finland, Guatemala, and India. The original Duesenberry specification performs very poorly. This leads us to conclude that the process of habit formation is continuous contrary to what is implied by Duesenberry's original specification and that consumption is a better indicator of the standard of living than income is. Estimates of the long‐run marginal propensities to consume are essentially the same as those computed from the permanent income hypothesis by Singh and Drost [1970]. This lends support to the view that the two hypotheses have essentially the same long‐run implications.

Date: 1971
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4991.1971.tb00787.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:revinw:v:17:y:1971:i:4:p:341-348

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0034-6586

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Income and Wealth is currently edited by Conchita D'Ambrosio and Robert J. Hill

More articles in Review of Income and Wealth from International Association for Research in Income and Wealth Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().