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Purpose – The purpose of this study was to explore Chinese consumers’ motivations for purchasing luxury products, and to unravel the interrelationships among individual differences, motives, and luxury consumption.

Methodology – Data were collected from general consumers living in a large cosmopolitan city of China. A total of 473 questionnaires provided usable data and were analyzed using SPSS.

Findings – Eight motives were identified: self-actualization, product quality, social comparison, others’ influence, investment for future, gifting, special occasions, and emotional purchasing. Results showed that personal income, age, the motives of gifting, others’ influence, and product quality were significant predictors of luxury spending. Younger consumers, who did not typically make plans before buying, were more likely to buy luxury products out of emotion and less likely to do so for self-actualization or future investment.

Research limitations – The conceptualization and operationalization of some concepts used in this study (e.g., luxury brands, luxury consumption, and motives) may not be robust. Social desirability bias could comprise the validity of some research findings.

Originality – Despite a large body of research on luxury consumption, to date, most studies have been conducted in Western developed countries. Past research has showed that the symbolic and social values related to luxury consumption are deeply embedded in culture. As such, it is meaningful to investigate luxury consumption in China, whose culture is vastly different from the West.

In any time and space and under any circumstance, we find peasants are never passive actors in their livelihoods and rural development. Instead, they always create space for manoeuvre in order to make changes. This chapter analyses the innovative actions taken by the majority of rural inhabitants in rural areas during the overwhelming modernization process, so as to affirm that peasants are the main actors of rural development. It is they who have shaped the transformation of rural societies and the history. Through the analysis, this chapter concludes that rural development is not an objective, a blueprint nor a design. It is not the to-be-developed rear field in modernization. It is not the babysitter for cities, nor a rehearsal place for bureaucrats to testify their random thoughts. Rural development is what peasants do. The path they have chosen reveals scenery so different from modernization. If we regard development as a social change, or a cross with influential meanings, we could understand rural development as peasants’ victories over their predicament. Villages accommodate not only peasants, but without peasants villages would surely vanish. In this sense, the most important part in rural development or rural change is peasants – their conditions and their feelings.

The purpose of the work is to verify the offered hypothesis and to evaluate the potential of the modern Russian entrepreneurship in economy’s informatization.

A specially developed proprietary method of evaluation of entrepreneurship’s potential in economy’s informatization and the level of its opening is used, which is created on the basis of the classical method of effectiveness evaluation. The information and analytical basis of studying the entrepreneurship’s potential in economy’s informatization is the materials of the report “The Global Information Technology Report 2016. Innovating in the Digital Economy”, prepared and presented by INSEAD, JOHNSON (Cornell University) and World Economic Forum. The offered proprietary method envisages evaluation of entrepreneurship’s potential in economy’s informatization and the level of its opening on the basis of statistical data according to four criteria: business and innovational environment, business ICT infrastructure, usage of new ICT in business, and economic consequences of using new ICT in business.

The author evaluates the entrepreneurship’s potential in economy’s informatization in modern Russia in 2016 and concludes that entrepreneurship’s potential in modern Russia is rather high, due to which high value of the index of information economy’s formation in Russia is achieved. That is, large entrepreneurship’s potential in economy’s informatization should be viewed as a precondition for information economy’s formation in modern Russia.

The author proves that entrepreneurship’s potential in economy’s informatization is an important component of the process of information economy’s formation in the economic system and can stimulate successful and quick implementation of this process or, quite on the contrary, slow down it rated, based on which it should be paid more attention.