Household Consumption and Savings Rate Depend Strongly on Employment Status, Income, and Age

Karl Brenke and Jan Pfannkuche

DIW Weekly Report, 2018, vol. 8, issue 13/14, 125-135

Abstract: On what and to what extent private households in Germany spend money varies significantly depending on employment status, income, and age. As this study based on the most current official sample survey of income and expenditure from 2013 shows, unemployed households on average spend over half of their income on basic needs such as living and food expenses while unemployed people living alone spend almost two-thirds on basic needs. Employed and retired households with multiple adults, on the other hand, spend only one-third of their income on living and food expenses. Model calculations show that recent price increases of goods and services have affected all households to a similar degree. Before 2013, low-income households were slightly more affected than others due to their consumption patterns. The savings rate also depends on employment status, income, and age. While low-income households even go into debt, many other households are sometimes saving 20 percent or more of their income. On average, every household saved a good 17 percent of their income in 2013.

Keywords: Consumer spending; saving rates in Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D31 E21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.581550.de/dwr-18-13-1.pdf (application/pdf)

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:diw:diwdwr:dwr8-13-1

Access Statistics for this article

DIW Weekly Report is currently edited by Tomaso Duso, Marcel Fratzscher, Peter Haan, Claudia Kemfert, Alexander Kritikos, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Stefan Liebig, Lukas Menkhoff, Karsten Neuhoff, Carsten Schröder, Katharina Wrohlich and Sabine Fiedler

More articles in DIW Weekly Report from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().