A Study Of The Effects Of Rural Population Structure On The Household Consumption In Gansu Province

Investment, consumption and foreign trade are known as the troika pulling economic growth. In recent years, with the deepening of reform and opening up, China’s economy develops rapidly, which depend mainly on investment and foreign trade, while the growth of the domestic demand is slow, therefore the government has introduced a series of policies to expand domestic demandThe 12th five-year plan of Gansu province put the expanding consumer demand as the focus of expanding domestic demand. Although the level of economic development in Gansu province has improved a lot in recent years, the contribution of consumption has been falling, especially the rural residents’ consumption. In 1978 the rural residents’ consumption of Gansu province has contributed 27.78% to GDP, while it was only 12.86% in 2011, which decreased by 14.41%. The vast rural consumer market is the important driving force of expanding consumer demands, therefore, the situation of low rural residents’ consumption cannot be ignoredPeople is the main body of society, the population problem is also one of the core social problems, so the changes in population structure will inevitably affect the development of social economy. in recent years, with the changes in birth rates, mortality rates and natural growth rate, the population structure in Gansu province had great changes. As the less developed western province of agriculture, the rural population occupied the main part of the total population in Gansu province. In 2011, the rural population account for 62.85% of the total population in Gansu province. Therefore if the rural population structure changes, the rural social economy will must be influenced.In the classification of population structure, the natural structure is the most important and has the largest influence on changes of population structure. Therefore, this paper selects the two variables which are age and sex structure to make a empirical research of low rural residents’ consumption.Based on the time series data of rural areas in Gansu province from 1990 to 2010, this paper introduces the variables of rural population structure into the econometric model and gets through the time series stationarity test, the vector autoregressive model (VAR) is used to make the empirical research of the relationship between the rural population structure’s variation and the rural residents’ consumption in Gansu province.The results show that the structure variation of rural population has a significant impact on residents’ consumption. Specifically, the impact of rural children raising coefficient is negative, while the impact of rural elderly dependency coefficient is positive, the total raising coefficient is falling. The impact of rural gender structure is also positive, the situation of gender imbalance in rural areas is serious. What’s more, the research result also suggests that the farmers’ income is a main influence factor of rural residents’ consumption. And influenced by traditional living environment of rural area, the farmers’ consumption habits is conservative, so the consumer behavior of a phase lag is effected by the early consumption habits.In view of the low rural consumption and combined with the above findings, we put forward the solution of the low rural residents’ consumption in Gansu province, which include several aspects, such as increasing the farmers’ income, improving the rural consumption environment, the construction of rural social security system, the transformation of farmers’ consumption concept and the governance of rural gender imbalance.