IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/asiaec/v17y2003i3p297-323.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Similarities in the Consumption Patterns of the Five Asian Tigers

Author

Listed:
  • Eliyathahby Antony Selvanathan
  • Saroja Selvanathan

Abstract

The five countries of Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan are considered to be the major Asian economic ‘Tigers’ behind Asia's growth in the late 1900s. In this paper, we analyze the consumption patterns of these five countries, using the most recent consumption data and employing the system‐wide approach. We find that the consumption data from these five countries support a number of empirical regularities, including the ‘law of demand’ and ‘Engel's law’. Based on the estimation results, we find that in all five countries, food, housing and medical care (except in Taiwan) are necessities, while clothing, durables (except in Singapore) and transport are luxuries. Demand for all the commodities is price inelastic. Furthermore, we find that the demand hypothesis, homogeneity, is acceptable for all five countries while Slutsky symmetry is acceptable only for Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. We also find that the preference‐independence hypothesis is acceptable for all countries except Japan. Overall, consumption patterns of consumers appear to be similar across the five countries, while some differences exist between Japan and the other four countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Eliyathahby Antony Selvanathan & Saroja Selvanathan, 2003. "Similarities in the Consumption Patterns of the Five Asian Tigers," Asian Economic Journal, East Asian Economic Association, vol. 17(3), pages 297-323, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:asiaec:v:17:y:2003:i:3:p:297-323
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8381.2003.00188.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8381.2003.00188.x
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1467-8381.2003.00188.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Haider, Adnan & Zaidi, Masroor, 2017. "Food Consumption Patterns and Nutrition Disparity in Pakistan," MPRA Paper 83522, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Lyons, Sean & Mayor, Karen & Tol, Richard S.J., 2009. "Convergence of consumption patterns during macroeconomic transition: A model of demand in Ireland and the OECD," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 26(3), pages 702-714, May.
    3. Genovaitė Liobikienė & Justina Mandravickaitė, 2013. "Convergence of new members of the EU: changes in household consumption expenditure structure regarding environmental impact during the prosperous period," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 15(2), pages 407-427, April.
    4. Meng-Shiuh Chang & Teng-Yuan Hu & Ching-Yuan Lin, 2016. "Variation in Engel's law across quantiles in Taiwan: toward an alternative concept of near poverty line," Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(1), pages 103-115, January.
    5. Rathnayaka, Shashika D. & Selvanathan, Eliyathamby A. & Selvanathan, Saroja, 2022. "Modelling the consumption patterns in the Asian countries," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 277-296.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:asiaec:v:17:y:2003:i:3:p:297-323. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eaeaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.