National Sample Survey 2009-2010 (66th round) - Schedule 10 - Employment and Unemployment

Data file: NSS66_Sch10_bk_9

National Sample Survey (NSS) Round 66, Schedule 10, Block 9: Household consumer expenditure

Household consumer expenditure is the sum total of monetary values of all goods and services consumed (out of purchase or procured otherwise) by the household on domestic account during a specific reference period. The definition of household consumer expenditure and the procedure for evaluating it will be the same as for Schedule 1.0. Care should be taken to exclude (i) expenditure on purchase of land and building (ii) expenditure on household enterprise including farm (iii) interest payments (iv) cash transfers (one-way transactions where the household does not receive any consumer goods and services in return), as all these may be mistakenly reported by the household as "consumer expenditure".

A worksheet has been designed to collect information on household consumer expenditure in Schedule 10. The aim of this worksheet is to arrive at an approximate value of household consumer expenditure, which will serve as proxy for total expenditure that could be obtained through the detailed consumer expenditure schedule. This approximate value of consumer expenditure will be used for classifying sample households into different levels of living for studying employment characteristics of households at different levels of living. The worksheet contains 36 different components of household consumer expenditure. Considering that an item group may contain different items, an attempt has been made to indicate, in parentheses, some of the items included in a particular group, so as to facilitate collection of consumer expenditure data for an item group. Two reference periods, viz,. 30 days and 365 days, will be used to record consumption of different groups of items; these are indicated in the headings of columns (3) and (4).

The items of consumption have been classified into four groups and the definition of consumption differs from group to group, as explained in tabular form below.

Sources of consumption: A household procures different items for its consumption by different ways. The different ways of collecting items of consumption are:
1) purchase
2) receipt in exchange of goods and services
3) home-grown/home-produced stock
4) transfer receipts such as gifts, loans, charities, etc., and
5) free collection

Imputation of value: Consider the items of Group I and Group III in the table above. If an item is purchased and consumed by a household, the value of consumption can be taken as its purchase value. But the value of an item consumed out of commodities received in exchange of goods and services, home-grown/home-produced stock, transfer receipts or free collection requires imputation. The rule for imputation of value of consumption of commodities is given below:
- The value of goods and services received in exchange of goods and services - including those received as perquisites by the members of the household from their employers - will be imputed at the rate of average local retail prices prevailing during the reference period. However, the judgement of the respondent about the price of the goods purchased in exchange is to be taken into account.
- The value of home produce will be imputed at the ex farm or ex factory rate. This should not include any element of distributive service charges.
- The value of consumption out of gifts, loans, free collection, etc., will be imputed at the average local retail prices prevailing during the reference period.
- The value of consumption out of purchase will be the value at which the purchase was made.

Special care is to be taken to ensure that the items which are consumed by the household out of home grown stock as well as from other sources like free collection, gifts, loans, etc., do not get missed out and necessary probing is to be done to include such consumption, if any, in the total consumption of the household.

Note: For items of Group II and Group IV, the question of imputation of value normally does not arise, as value of consumption is, for these groups, defined as expenditure incurred, and is zero when zero expenditure is incurred. However, in case of items of Group II and Group IV received from employer or any creditor as perquisite or payment, imputation of value is necessary because for such items it is considered as if the receiver incurs expenditure on them. Imputation in such cases should be done at local retail prices.