Convergence of Consumption Structure

Purpose of this paper is to analyze the convergence of the consumption structure, both at the empirical and the theoretical levels. The basic empirical result is that the consumption structure converges quite quickly. We feel that the income effect is not sufficient to explain this high speed. That is why we introduce some post-Keynesian motives of consumer behaviour. We present a model of the dynamics of consumption structure and describe different simulation experiments with this model. These experiments are based on the actual data about consumers in the Czech Republic and in Germany (in fact, we approximate by German consumers the old EU members’ consumers). The results of simulations show that the behavior of the model really leads to the convergence of the consumption structure in the Czech Republic and the old EU members, so the post-Keynesian motives of consumer behavior are among possible explanations of the empirical fact of convergence.