| The economy of China has entered into a transition period since 1990's, and it has changed from the planned economic system to the market economy system, from closed economy to open economy. The change of economic system has made strong uncertainties to Chinese rural residents, which led to the situation of low consumption and high savings. The situation causes serious negative impact on long-term stability of China's economic development. Therefore, it has an important theoretical and practical significance to systematically study how the uncertainties affect rural residents' consumption choices in the transition period. The article takes the idea of raising questions, analyzing questions and solving the problem, and follows the guiding principle of the theoretical analysis and empirical testing, qualitative analysis and quantitative study.The article first reviews the western consumption theories, easily introduces the traditional consumption theories, and focuses on the analysis of consumption theories under uncertainties, especially the precautionary savings theory and liquidity constraint theory. And the article explains the practice and development of traditional consumption theories and uncertainty consumption theories in China. And then the article analyzes the uncertainty factors in the transition period, and describes the influence and change of rural residents' consumption under these uncertainty factors. Combining with the needs of analysis, the article distinguishes the uncertainties into the uncertainties of income, the uncertainties of expenditure and financing constraints. According to the three factors, the article sets up the relevant mathematical model to empirically analyze their impact on residents' consumption.The empirical studies in the critical part of my article are three econometric models, which select the relevant macroeconomic data of 1978 -2006. And according to the change of uncertainties in the transition period, the article divides the former period (1978-1992) and the later period (1993-2006) for empirical researches. The over-sensitivity model and the precautionary savings model have been used to study on how the uncertain income affects the rural residents' consumption, and the two models deduce the facts that the vary of income affects the consumption in both periods and the uncertainty of income in later period makes significantly larger impact on household consumption than the former period. In the study of uncertain expenditure and financing constraints of rural residents' consumption, the article makes an innovative model combining with the precautionary savings theory and liquidity constraint theory. Through empirical testing of the model, the result proves the conclusions that the uncertainty of expenditure makes significant limit on rural residents' consumption and financing constraints in later period limit consumption.Through theoretical and empirical analysis in the article, it proves that the situation of low consumption and high savings in the transition period is closely related to the uncertain income, uncertain expenditure, and the financing constraint. Based on the research findings, the article puts forward some suggestions and policies, such as enhancing the rural residents' income and growth rate, reducing the uncertainty of expenditure, developing the consumer credit market, and other consumer promotion recommendations. |
