Food Consumption Expenditure and Standard of Living in Romania

Background: Characteristics And Factors Of Food Consumption Expenditure

The increase of economic and social development levels lead to larger or smaller changes of the structure of consumption expenditures by category of goods and services, as well as within them. According to Engel's Law, the largest shares of total expenditures of poor households are allocated to food consumption. In the case of developed countries the stability of the expenditure structure of consumption is higher than in developing countries and significantly different from the expenditure structure of average household income in underdeveloped countries.

In a report of the United States Department of Agriculture (Muhammad, Seale, Meade & Regmi, 2011) which updates the international evidence of food consumption patterns using 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP) data, analyzing the incomes and expenditures from 144 countries, shows that in the countries with low income, 48.5% of it is used for food, beverages and tobacco, and in the countries with high income, the share is only 20,4% (2.37 times less), the ratio being inversely for medical and health expenditure share (8.9% in the countries with high income, compared to 4.5% in countries with low income) and for recreation (9.5% in the countries with high income, compared to 4.5% in countries with low income).