Many countries including the U.S. are now embarking on multiyear projects to redesign their surveys of household expenditures. This volume presents work by many of the world’s leading experts on consumption measurement meant to illuminate the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. The aim of the volume, in broadest terms, is to provide a knowledge base for use of agencies and researchers as they design new systems for measurement of household expenditures. To that end, the volume includes a comprehensive set of chapters describing the current status and use of the U.S. Consumer Expenditu ... More

Many countries including the U.S. are now embarking on multiyear projects to redesign their surveys of household expenditures. This volume presents work by many of the world’s leading experts on consumption measurement meant to illuminate the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. The aim of the volume, in broadest terms, is to provide a knowledge base for use of agencies and researchers as they design new systems for measurement of household expenditures. To that end, the volume includes a comprehensive set of chapters describing the current status and use of the U.S. Consumer Expenditure (CE) survey, with a focus on documenting the key deficiencies that the redesign process is meant to address; a number of chapters describing new modes of data collection (including the use of scanner data, internet panels, and administrative data from government and private sources); chapters outlining the importance of various objectives that such surveys might satisfy, ranging from estimation of price and income elasticities to studying the differential evolution of income and consumption inequality; chapters describing comparisons of the data available from other existing sources to those obtainable from an expenditure survey; comparisons of alternative approaches and results in different countries; and much more. The chapters in this volume were written around the same time that the National Academy of Science released its report on the Bureau of Labor Statistics proposed redesign for the US CE survey, and the two approaches provide complementary perspectives on the pros and cons of various proposed redesign strategies.