Research On The Consumption Level And Structure Of China’s Urban Residents

Consumption, investment and export are the "three carriages" driving the economic growth of a country, which consumer demand plays an important role in the rapid and healthy development of the national economy. Urban residents consumption demand is an important part of the consumer demand. Analyzing China’s urban residents consumption level and structure exactly and comprehensively, grasping its the trends and characteristics, it has important theoretical and practical significance for government departments formulating consumer policy and stimulating urban residents to expand consumption demands.For a long time, the economic development of China depends mainly on investment rather than consumption. Although investment can promote economic growth and increase production, but also it caused the excess resources in production department. Under the background of the insufficient domestic demand, the mode of the investment driving economic development hasn’t adapt to the the realistic situation in our country and can’t meet the demand of economic development. Consumption is the fundamental driving force of economic development, we should pay attention to the driving force, exerting its stimulating effect on the economy. However the reform of system in our country increases the uncertainty of expenditure of urban residents. As a result, the urban residents reduce consumption and increase savings in order to prevent the uncertainty in the future. Uncertainty caused by the reform of system significantly changes the consumption of urban residents in China.Combining qualitative and quantitative analysis, this paper analyzes the uncertainties of consumption level and structure of urban residents and the degree of impact. This thesis analyzes the background, significance, domestic and foreign literature review, research methods and innovation points firstly; analyzing related consumption theories, it provides the theoretical foundation for this thesis; and then this paper adopts qualitative analysis to study the current situation of urban residents’ consumption level and characteristics, after that it researches the influence of education, health care, housing consumption uncertainty and income uncertainty caused by employment risk on the consumption of urban residents, according to the status of urban residents consumption level and structure; in the empirical research, weconstruct urban residents consumption model using the 1978-2014 relevant data,adopting quantitative analysis to study the impact of urban residents disposable income,income uncertainty and the price changes of education, health care, housing in the consumption structure on the consumption of urban residents. Finally, according to the results of qualitative and quantitative analysis, this thesis puts forward the policy recommendations.This article use adjusting deviation rate to represent the income uncertainty which our urban citizens faced, this is an innovative point. This paper use education price growth,housing price growth and medical health price growth to measure the education expenditure uncertainty, living expenditure uncertainty and health care expenditure uncertainty that urban citizens facing. The conclusions of this thesis show that the consumption expenditure of urban residents not only affected by the disposable income,but also the uncertainty of the future expenditure. The disposable income is the mainly influence factor, income uncertainty and expenditure uncertainty has a negative correlation with the urban residents, restricting the consumption of urban residents, and the influence of income uncertainty is more. In the expenditure uncertainty, the changes of education price, medical price and residential price will cause the expenditure of the urban residents to change in the opposite direction. Among them, the effect of education is greatest, followed by medical care; housing is the last one; however, the effect of living price on the urban residents consumption is also noteworthy.