Annual expenditure. By expenditure groups

Family consumption

Economic activity of families that consists of the utilisation of goods and services to satisfy their material needs.

Family expenditure

Monetary volume that a household and all of its members use to pay for what are considered consumer goods and services for use in the same household or to be transferred free of charge to other households or institutions.

Household

Set of people habitually living in the same dwelling. There are two types of households: one-person households, made up of one person, and multi-person households, made up of two or more people.

Consumer unit

A different accountable concept of members of a household which is obtained by applying adjustment factors to expenditure, which enables us to weight different levels of need between families of different sizes and composition.

The data on family expenditure was obtained from the Family budget survey (EPF) conducted by the INE. Family income is expressed in annual averages per household, person and consumption unit.

Household consumer expenditure represents the main economic activity of the population, and is an approach to the concept of private consumption as the most important component of a country's aggregate demand. The main aim of the statistics on household consumer expenditure is to produce information on the size, structure and distribution of this expense, as well as inter-annual variations of the aggregate consumption. The consumer expenditure recorded in the EPF refers to the monetary flow that household economies spend on the purchase of consumer products, as well as all non-monetary expenditure that is generated on the basis of supply, self-sufficiency, any salary in kind and imputed housing rent.

The expenditure can be calculated per person in the household and unit of consumption in the household. In order to obtain the units of consumption we use the so-called equivalence scales, which turn household members into units of consumption. These equivalence scales are applied because economies of scale are generated when a household shares certain goods and services, which means that the needs of a household with n persons are sometimes lower than the needs of a household with just one person.

In this case we use the modified OECD scale, which gives the following values to each member of the household:

• Main provider: 1
• Adult older than 13: 0.5
• Child 13 and under: 0.3

The total expenditure of a household is divided by the number of units of consumption in the household and we thus obtain the equivalent expenditure per unit of consumption. Each member of a household is assigned the equivalent expenditure of his or her household.

From 2024 onwards, it has been included the new United Nations International Classification of Consumption known as ECOICOP 2018 (European Classification of Individual Consumption by Purpose), which replaces the classification that had been used since 2016.

For further information about these statistics, you may check the methodology.