中国城镇居民住房与消费——基于地位寻求视角

China's Urban Residents' Housing and Consumption:Based on Status-Seeking Angle

针对城镇居民消费水平持续走低、平均消费倾向总体下滑的状态,从地位寻求视角来解释中国的消费现象。通过在效用函数中纳入代表地位性商品消费变量,求解得到一个动态面板模型,运用系统GMM的两步估计法对模型进行估计。实证结果表明:中国消费低迷的一个重要原因是城镇居民对具有代表性的地位商品——住宅(面积)的追求。对全国城镇人均住宅建筑面积和全国城镇人均收入差距进行相关性检验及模型回归验证,间接说明了收入差距扩大会强化住宅面积的攀比行为。

China＇s urban residents consumption level and APC have both shown overall declining trends, in view of situations above, this research creatively put forward a status-seeking angle to explain the China＇s consumption phenomenon. Through adding a variable representative for the positional-goods consumption into the utility function, this paper finally obtains a solution which is a dynamic panel model; the data of this paper are all China＇s macroeconomic data whose time span is between 2000 and 2012, and the estimating method is the system GMM in two-step. The empirical analysis result reveals that a very important reason of why China＇s consumption level is low is that China＇s urban residents favor housing and pursue it to have a relatively large area. Moreover, through testing the correlation between the data of national residents＇ housing area and income disparity, and testing the model regression, this paper verifies indirectly that the income disparity will strengthen the behavior of comparing the housing area.