군집분석을 통해 살펴본 1인 가구의 연령대별 소비지출패턴

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to identify consumption expenditure patterns of one-person households of different age groups, find out the socio-economic characteristics of the identified clusters, and then compare the patterns of different age groups. For these purposes, one-person households were separated by three age groups : younger households(less than 35 years old), middle aged households(35-64 years old or less), and older households(over 64 years old). The consumption expenditure pattern means the way consumption categories are combined to form a way of life as a whole(Chung 1998, p.39). The consumption categories of this study employed those of the 2012 Household Income & Expenditure Survey of Statistics Korea that is the data of the study. The 12 standard consumption categories are ‘Food and non-alcoholic beverages’, ‘Alcoholic beverages and tobacco’, ‘Clothing and footwear’, ‘Housing, water, electricity and other fuels’, ‘Furnishings and household equipment’, ‘Health’, ‘Transport’, ‘Communication’, ‘Recreation and culture’, ‘Education’, ‘Restaurants and hotels’, and ‘Miscellaneous goods and services’. Cluster analysis which is a statistical method for categorizing the households into similar groups was utilized. The variables used as criteria variables are budget shares allocated to each consumption categories : i.e. the proportions of the expenditures of each consumption categories in total consumption expenditure. K-means cluster analyses were conducted using SPSS. The data of the study were the annual raw data of the 2012 Household Income & Expenditure Survey of Statistics Korea. Total sample consisted of 10,400 households of the whole country except farm and fishery households. Among them, 1,653 households were one-person households. Weighted results were presented. The main findings are as follows: Four consumption expenditure patterns are identified for each age groups. The clusters are named according to their dominant budget shares. For younger one-person households, the identified clusters are diverse activity oriented(48.6%), restaurants and hotels-dominated(25.6%), housing-dominated(21.9%) and transport-dominated(4%). Diverse activity oriented cluster consists the largest proportion of young one-person households. These households allocated their budget to diverse consumption categories and it shows their active lives compared with the households in other clusters. Of the younger one-person households, housing-dominated cluster shows the lowest economic level, that is the consumption expenditure level of this cluster is the lowest among younger one-person households. The unemployment rate is the highest and the household rate in budget deficit is also the highest. For the one-person households in the middle ages, the identified clusters are restaurants and hotels-dominated(38.2%), food-dominated(32.3%), housing-dominated(25.7%) and transport- dominated(7.1%). Except the food-dominated cluster, the clustering is similar with younger households. Even though the names are identical but the consumption expenditure structure is different. Household budget is relatively evenly allocated in various consumption categories for the one-person households in the middle ages. For the older one-person households, food-dominated(37.4%), housing-dominated(22.5%), balanced(22%) and health-dominated (18%) are identified as clusters. In general, the budget of the older one-person households are more likely tend to be intensively allocated to top three consumption categories for their all clusters than the other clusters of younger households. The levels of income and expenditure are the lowest for food-dominated cluster. But housing-dominated cluster and health-dominated cluster seem to be more problematic in terms of the consumption expenditure structures and the inability of solving the problems. The similar expenditure pattern which is identified across all ages is housing-dominated expenditure pattern. This result implies that the public policy of the first priority for one-person households may be the housing policy. The specially identified patterns for each age group are diverse activity oriented pattern for younger household, and balanced and health-dominated patterns for the older households. No special pattern is found for the middle-aged group. This implies that the one-person households change their consumption expenditure patterns as they get older. The consumption expenditure patterns of the middle-aged one-person households are in between those of younger and older households.