An Analysis Of The Impact Of Time Poverty On Consumption Of Family In Rural China

This essay studies the impact of time poverty on consumption of rural family of China. The report of the18th National Congress pointed that the issue of agriculture and farmer is the key point of China. With the development of society and economics, the revenue and leisure time of people enhance, but the contradiction between work and household responsibility still exists. Many families not only spend lots of time on children and doing housework, but also go outside to work for the family income. They have to bear the dual pressures between time and revenue. This atmosphere is much common in rural China. With the increase in labor time, no matter the paid work time or the unpaid work time, the time of rest or leisure decreases. Labor Economics defines the overload time of work as Time Poverty. Now the researches on the impact of time poverty on consumption are more about theory analysis, and the empirical analyses are about the impact of labor time on revenue. This essay tries to explore the impact of time poverty on consumption of rural family of China and the degree of the impact.There’s no uniformed statement of the definition and measurement of time poverty. This essay adopt the method of United Nations use to define Absolute Poverty to define Time poverty as the situation that work time surpass some particular time. As to the delimitation of the poverty time line, this essay defines it as the1.5times of the median time of the sample.The design of the essay is as follows:Family consumption can be affected by the family revenue, the level of education and the work time. Some relative studies suggest that the poorer families are more likely to encounter time poverty. This essay empirically studies the impact of time poverty on consumption of rural family of China with the data from the CHNS on the basic of the theories and the history of the time use and consumption. And then I make some recommendation.The results of the empirical research are as follows:1. The paid work time poverty has positive impact on the consumption of rural family of China, while the unpaid work time poverty has negative impact.2. The paid work time poverty has a deeper impact on consumption of rural family of China than unpaid time poverty. But too long unpaid work time may weaken the impact of the paid work time poverty on the consumption of rural family of China when the interaction effect is taken into consideration.3. The increase of family revenue and the level of education may increase the family consumption as well.The main contributions of this study have three aspects. Firstly, this research focuses the issue of time poverty affect the consumption of rural family on China. Secondly, this research divide labor time into paid work time and unpaid work time to analysis the effect. Thirdly, the empirical results of this study take the interaction effect of the two kinds of time poverty into consideration.