Twenty-five years of materialism: do the US and Europe diverge?

Stefano Bartolini and Francesco Sarracino

Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena

Abstract: Using data from the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, we compare the trends of materialism over the last quarter of century among the US and six major European countries: France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Great Britain and Sweden. We use the definition of materialism adopted by positive psychologists. We find that the trends in Europe and in the US diverged. In the US materialism increased, while in Europe it decreased. However, some mixed patterns arise. In particular, Great Britain, Spain and Sweden showed some symptoms of an increase of materialistic values, although they were far less pronounced compared to the American ones. As far as the levels of materialism are concerned, the US started from relatively less materialistic positions. However, towards the end of our period of observation, they scored very high in the ranking of materialism in our sample of countries.

Keywords: materialism; trends; positive psychology; United States; Europe (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 I31 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.deps.unisi.it/quaderni/689.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Twenty-Five Years of Materialism: Do the US and Europe Diverge? (2017)
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:usi:wpaper:689

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Fabrizio Becatti ().