Consumer Expenditure Survey 1973, aggregated to household level

Statistics Norway has used periodic consumption studies to develop the consumer price index. Detailed knowledge of the consumption of private households is also the foundation of quality of life studies, as well as studies concerning income, development, and e.g. the effects of indirect versus direct taxation schemes. In addition, the data is sufficiently detailed for dietary and nutritional analyses. Furthermore, the data is appropriate for follow-up surveys, models of economic planning, or for specification of private consumption in national accounts.

Large consumption surveys were conducted in 1958, 1967, and the survey of 1973 is the last of its kind. In 1974, SSB transitioned to a system of annual surveys with smaller samples. Between 1974 and 1976, data were published for three years at a time. The annual gross sample was approximately 1500 households, and the net samples were between 1100 - 1200 households. The objective to build a detailed overview of private consumption, which was to serve as the foundation of the weighting scheme of the consumer price index, remained. One also wanted to investigate the different consumption habits of different types of households. The households were stratified by income, main provider, employment status, age, neighbourhood, magnitude of total expenditures et cetera. The data is organized in several components and contain information concerning background (collected through an introductory interview), detailed consumption measured by value and magnitude (collected by respondents' consumption diary, individual and household), the household's purchases of durable consumer goods (perpetual capital goods, collected by concluding interview), consumption of self-produced goods, and income and taxation.

The consumption survey of 1973 was conducted using a subset of the sample of the income and wealth survey of the same year. The survey on living conditions was conducted using a further subset of the original sample. Due to the cumulative potential of these data, they have been used in a series of research projects. Consequently, NSD offers several versions of the dataset .