Quantile analysis of the aspirational middle class in Malaysia: spending behaviour emulation or dissociation?
International Journal of Social Economics
ISSN: 0306-8293
Article publication date: 15 March 2022
Issue publication date: 7 June 2022
Abstract
Purpose
This paper focusses on how the educated and less-educated middle class react differently to income increases, against an intertwined literature backdrop of Engel's law, quality of life, aspirational and conspicuous consumption. The paper seeks to answer two main questions: Is there evidence of the middle class, particularly the educated, trying to emulate the upper class by shifting towards aspirational consumption? Is there any distinct expenditure behaviour amongst the middle class?
Design/methodology/approach
Combining the Malaysian 2016 Household Expenditure Survey (HES) and the 2016 Consumer Price Indices datasets, quantile estimations are applied on the merged dataset of 14,326 households.
Findings
There is evidence of the educated middle class emulating the upper class in terms of food share, home furnishing and starchy produce expenditure behaviour. The less-educated middle class exhibits a predilection for home furnishing expenditures when income increases, whilst the educated shows signs of dissociating themselves from such material acquisitions. The paper concludes that the middle class is collectively an aspirational class, but with diverging paths towards upward social mobility between the educated and less-educated households.
Originality/value
Aspirational consumption of the middle class has not been given detailed empirical treatment at the household micro-level in the literature, especially for upper-middle income countries like Malaysia. The paper starts off by detecting an anomaly in the Engel's food share coefficients, where the middle class sees unexpected larger declines in food share than those of the upper class. This is the paper's departure point from the literature.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: This work was supported by the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education Fundamental Research Grant Scheme [Ministry reference number FRGS/1/2018/SS08/UUM/01/1].
Citation
Soon, J.-J. (2022), "Quantile analysis of the aspirational middle class in Malaysia: spending behaviour emulation or dissociation?", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 49 No. 7, pp. 993-1008. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSE-06-2021-0367
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited