Economic Analysis Of Leisure Consumption

With the arrival of a leisure age, leisure consumption is becoming a new engine of economic growth. It not only creates a substantial amount of job opportunities which help relieve employment pressure and maintain social stability, but also functions as a very effective approach to the regeneration of human resources and animation of human capital. The significance of leisure consumption makes it an urgent mission to strengthen the theoretical research in this area. It is against this background that the dissertation is prepared and written, an attempt of a systematic study on leisure consumption.The paper starts from the decision making mechanism and behavior of people in their leisure consumption. With a solid literature review on the research writings of scholars from home and abroad, the author formulates three theoretical models of leisure consumption, brings forward a hypothesis of behavioral characteristics of leisure consumption of Chinese urban households, and explores practical strategies and solutions to the promotion of leisure consumption in China.The paper consists of five chapters. In Chapter 1, the author explains the impending age of leisure pursuits as the broad social background that prompts her to focus her study on leisure consumption for the doctoral dissertation. In China, leisure consumption study has its great importance both in theory and practice. Compared with many other countries, China is still rather immature in this research area though the new age has already felt a pressing need for theoretical guidance of leisure economy. Chapter 2 is an intensive review on the main theoretical achievements in leisure studies, which serves as the foundation of this dissertation. In the literature review, the author brings forward new opinions. The paper holds that leisure economy is a lively field of academic research in many foreign countries, which has pooled a considerable amount of achievements in the perspectives of time use and family production in particular. However, the theoretical study of leisure economy still has the limitations of localization as well as insufficiency.The paper predicts that the development of theories on leisure economy will mainly go in three directions. First, there will be systematic studies on leisure consumers and theirbehaviors; second, by examining leisure in the framework of macroeconomic analysis, academic researchers will focus on the influence and functional'mechanism of leisure on the macroeconomic variations; thirdly, leisure study from the perspective of family production will intensify, more variations will be introduced into econometric testing, and the variations will be adjusted. At the present stage, the weakness in leisure study in China chiefly exists in four areas where breakthroughs are to be made: first, the scope of study needs to be expanded; second, the theoretical level of study is to be elevated, especially for the study on leisure economy; third, innovation in theoretical leisure study should be vigorously emphasized; and last, trans-disciplinary approach in leisure study is to be advocated. The experience of leisure studies in foreign countries indicates that in China it is important for scholars to pay sufficient attention to the study of leisure consumption, to the inoculation and application of theories from other disciplines, and to the contribution of empirical studies.Chapter 3 is the main body of this dissertation, in which the author constructs three theoretical models. Firstly, after an analysis of leisure consumption in the framework of the traditional work-leisure model, the author formulates a new theoretical model of leisure consumption by bringing in the function of household production. This new model reveals that the equilibrium of consumers is reached when the marginal rate of production is equal to the marginal rate of substituting goods for consumption time. It has a greater power to explain the consumers' leisure decision, for it considers the value of leisure itself and weakens the impact of consumers' preference on their leisure decisions.The second new model is one of consumers' inter-temporal leisure consumption. The innovation of this model lies in the change the author has done to the assumption condition of neoclassic consumption theory, and the consideration it gives to consumers' choice for inter-temporal leisure consumption when liquidity constraint exists. The author constructs the third new model by inducting the "time constraint". This double-constraint model divides leisure products into two categories — time-intensive leisure products and goods-intensive leisure products. This is a new and innovative classification, hi addition, as it regards the time spent and goods consumed in the process of leisure consumption as equally important elements and takes both into utility function, this double-constraint modelis more inclusive and stronger in the power to explain consumers' leisure behavior.Chapter 4 concentrates on the characteristic of leisure consumption behavior of Chinese urban households. First of all, exterior environment and internal elements of consumers are discussed to form the theoretical foundation of the study on the characteristic of leisure consumption behavior. The author then identifies three phases of behavior change of Chinese urban households in their leisure consumption, and makes a systematic analysis of the behavior features of each phase. On the basis of this analytical work, the paper generates a new hypothesis, i.e. leisure consumption behavior of Chinese urban households is dominated by income strata.In the opinion of the author, while the four basic hypotheses — absolute income hypothesis, close budget constraint hypothesis, strong time constraint hypothesis and non-reversion hypothesis — do apply to the superficial phenomena of leisure consumption behavior of Chinese urban households in an age of institutional transformation, the dominant leisure consumption behavior has the characteristics of stratum difference. The reasons are the increasing gaps in household income of Chinese urban families and the variety as well as particularity of leisure activities, which further strengthen the stratum difference of leisure consumption. To validate the hypothesis, the author makes a test and analysis on data gathered in an investigation done in Chengdu.Chapter 5 contains the strategies and solutions that the author has devised to promote Chinese leisure consumption. 1. Update people's conception to stimulate the demand for leisure consumption. The author identifies three types of laggard notions that are cumbering the growth of people's demand for leisure consumption. They include the restraining conception that annuls luxury and advocates thrift, the vulgar conception that encourages conspicuous consumption, and the passive conception that gives work higher priority. Therefore, it is critical to provide leisure education to people of the nation and develops a sustainable conception of leisure consumption that is scientific, innovative and active in nature. 2. Breed new hot points of leisure consumption to form more consumer groups. In the opinion of the author, the new hot points of leisure consumption (such as tourism and recreation, sports and time-economical leisure activities) are an engine to bring along the growth of leisure economy. To a great extent, the growth rate of leisure economy in China...