Consumer Expenditure Surveys

Consumer expenditure surveys (CES), or family expenditure surveys (FES) as they had been called in Britain until recently, are studies that primarily aim to collect data related to household expenditures for goods and services used in everyday life. The British former FES was taken over by the Expenditure and Food Survey, at the merger with National Food Survey in 2001, and was renamed the Living Costs and Food Survey in 2008. These U.S. and U.K. surveys and their equivalents in other countries are conducted by the statistical departments of the central governments and provide information on household incomes and expenditures, as well as demographic and economic characteristics of household members. The collected data are used to calculate, in official terms, the weights for an index of prices, which are applied as a deflator for incomes and costs of living. They also provide timely and detailed information on spending patterns of different types of households that can meet the data needs of the researchers and students of consumer culture.

One of the oldest of such data-collecting exercises was carried out in 1888 to 1891 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics under the leadership of Carroll Wright. There had been a few experimental surveys of the standard of living of the poor conducted by the forerunning European researchers in the mid-nineteenth century, such as Frédéric Le Play, Edouard Ducpetiaux, and Ernst Engel. In Britain, while the classic poverty surveys of London by Charles Booth in 1886 to 1899, and of York by Seebohm Rowntree in 1899 to 1900, provided the backdrop, the first official national survey was conducted by the Board of Trade in 1904. Several attempts to update the cost-of-living index followed the initial enquiries on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1930s and after World War II, in tandem with the development of the method of large-scale sample survey throughout this [Page 267]earlier period. The current practice of continuous annual surveys was established in 1957 in Britain and in 1979 in the United States. Other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries also established a similar practice around this period: Italy in 1968, Canada in 1953, Germany in 1962, France in 1965, and Japan in 1946. The surveys are conducted quinquennially in France and Germany. Consumer expenditure surveys, in current forms, provide essential information on consumption patterns that can be compared statistically over a long period of time and also across different countries.

The basic framework of the surveys usually consists of the diary survey and the interview survey. In the United States, the two surveys—diary and interview—employ a different data-collection technique and sample. In the interview survey, each family in the sample is interviewed every three months to recall large expenditures and regular payments over five calendar quarters. In the diary survey, which is particularly designed to collect detailed expenditures on food, the respondent family is asked to keep records of expenditures daily for a two-week period. In Britain, on the other hand, the interview and diary surveys are both collected from the same sample of respondent households. The Household Interview Survey is designed to collect information about regular household bills and expenditure on major but infrequent purchases.

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