Economic Fluctuations,Revenue Structure And Consumer Behavior

Since the start of reform and opening up, Chinese economy has maintained a rapid growth rate, and the average per capita income of residents has increased greatly as well. But since the 1990s, the growth rate of Chinese residents’ consumption has significantly reduced. The consumption rate is keeping low for a long time. In order to stimulate residents’consumption and expand internal demand, Chinese government had issued and implemented a series of related policies. However, the effect is not very obvious. In addition, the cyclical fluctuations of national economy will inevitably lead to the change of residents’ income and its structure, thus affecting the final consumption of residents. Therefore, it is very necessary to analyze consumers’ behavior with consideration of economic fluctuation.This paper used the data of Chinese Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data during 1989-2006 to construct pseudo panel data, and established Markov system transfer model on the basis of pseudo panel data to study the relationship of the residents’ income structure and consumption behavior under the circumstances of the economic fluctuation. The empirical part of this paper applied the pseudo panel data of the Markov system transfer model into the study of the relationship between the income structure and consumption behavior in China. On one hand, this can make full use of the panel data at the household level and reflect individual differences to reveal economic problems more accurately; On the other hand, the panel data of the Markov system transfer model reflects the economic fluctuations so that we can study the marginal effect of all kinds of income in different economic environment, which can present more asymmetric economic policies targeted to stimulate consumption growth.The analysis result shows:(1) In addition to the general income level, income structure is also an important factor which influences the consumption. Different sources of income have different marginal effect of residents’ consumption level. (2) Residents’ consumption has "depression" and "rising" two states. The continuous probability of consumption is much higher in the "depression" period than that in the "rising" period. And the probability of consumption transferred by the "rising" state to "depression" state is also much higher than its reverse direction which means that there are significant asymmetric effects between the transferring of two states of consumption.Combined with the results of empirical analysis, this paper puts forward some policies to improve residents’ income and optimize the income structure as well as to improve the consumers’ expectations, in order to stimulate the consumption demand of residents and to keep the economy growing at a steady and rapid rate.