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This paper aims to analyse the dynamic relationships between prices, wages and private consumption for a sample of the 12 initial EMU members for the period 1999-2019. To do so, we adopt a novel approach based on panel-VAR models that allows to perform a multivariate Granger causality analysis between the variables mentioned within a complex information system which also includes labour market and economic cycle variables. In a second stage, we complete this analysis with application of the iterative PC algorithm that allows us to interpret the results of the model in the lines of graphic theory and causal graphs methods. The results obtained reveal a causal relationship from prices to wages, supporting the wage indexation hypothesis for the whole sample. On the contrary, we do not find evidence of wages causing any increase of prices, which enables us to disregard the wage-inflation hypothesis. Additionally, the approach adopted enables country-specific analyses, which are essential for understanding the specificities of each economy. In this regard, we find that Ireland is the only country where private consumption appears to exert pressure on prices. Meanwhile, Mediterranean economies like Spain and Greece seem to follow a debt-led model where private consumption drives wage levels. 

Purpose This study examines the impact of incidental pride on consumer preference for attention-grabbing products. This effect is mediated by the desire to gain attention. This study also shows that the effect of incidental pride is qualified by visibility of consumption. Design/methodology/approach Using two studies with between-subjects designs, this research examines the difference in preferences for attention-grabbing products between hubristic and authentic pride. Findings Individuals who experience hubristic pride (vs authentic pride) show greater preference for attention-grabbing products and have a strong desire to gain attention from others. However, when consumption is perceived as private (vs public), preferences for attention-grabbing products weaken for those who experience hubristic pride. Research limitations/implications This research studies the effect of incidental pride on consumer preference. By examining dispositional pride effects, future research may expand these findings, which enrich the literature on emotion. Future research can identify the potential mechanism for the relationship between authentic pride and preference for attention-grabbing products in the context of private consumption. Practical implications Marketers and salespersons can guide and recommend products with attention-grabbing features to customers celebrating a friend’s success in recognition of their innate ability. Second, marketers may encourage consumers to buy attention-grabbing products with targeted advertising or emotion-eliciting advertising (i.e., evoke a certain type of pride). Originality/value While prior studies focused on basic emotions, this research has investigated self-conscious emotions that are central to consumer behavior. This research contributes to the understanding of self-conscious emotions that affect consumers’ behavioral responses in unrelated situations. Investigating the two facets of pride, the findings show the impact of pride on the preference for attention-grabbing products and reveals that visibility of consumption moderates the effect of pride.

This paper investigates the determinants of private consumption growth (PCG) in Albania during the period 19972023. Employing a combination of Vector Autoregression (VAR) modeling and multiple linear regression analysis, this study delves into the dynamic relationships between PCG and key macroeconomic indicators, including economic growth (GDPG), trade openness, domestic credit to the private sector (DCPS), inflation, and lending rates (RPL). These methodologies provide a comprehensive framework for analyzing both short-term interactions and long-term equilibrium relationships among these variables. The empirical findings suggest that GDP growth and trade openness have a statistically significant positive impact on private consumption. This underscores the importance of economic expansion and external market integration in stimulating household consumption patterns. Among these, GDP growth emerges as the most significant driver, indicating that sustained economic growth fosters higher levels of household spending. Conversely, inflation and lending rates exhibit a statistically significant negative association with private consumption. This highlights the detrimental effects of price instability and high borrowing costs on household expenditure, emphasizing the sensitivity of private consumption to financial and economic stability. While domestic credit to the private sector shows a positive influence on PCG, its significance is less pronounced, suggesting that this channel may not be fully utilized in stimulating consumption through improved access to credit. The VAR model further reveals the dynamic nature of private consumption, with past consumption patterns exerting a significant influence on current levels. Granger causality tests identify bidirectional causality between GDP growth and private consumption, indicating a reinforcing relationship between these variables. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the factors influencing private consumption in Albania. It emphasizes the importance of policies that promote stable economic growth, maintain manageable inflation levels, and reduce lending rates to support household consumption and drive sustainable economic development.

Trade openness plays a pivotal role in shaping economic structures, particularly in fragile and import-dependent economies. Despite its importance, limited research has examined the direct effects of trade liberalization on private consumption in such contexts. This study addresses this gap by empirically investigating the relationship between trade openness and private consumption in Somalia, a country heavily reliant on imports and characterized by structural vulnerabilities. Using annual time-series data from 1980 to 2022, the study incorporates key macroeconomic variables trade openness, economic growth, inflation, population growth, foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic investment and applies the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model, supported by Canonical Cointegrating Regression and Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares for robustness. Granger causality tests are employed to examine the directional relationships among variables. The results indicate that trade openness significantly enhances private consumption in both the short run and long run, driven by greater access to imported goods and services. Economic growth is the strongest determinant, while FDI contributes positively to private consumption. In contrast, domestic investment negatively affects consumption, reflecting a potential trade-off between current consumption and capital accumulation. Inflation has a negative short-run effect, while population growth appears statistically insignificant in the long run. Granger causality results highlight dynamic feedback mechanisms between trade openness, consumption and economic growth. These findings have vital policy implications: Somalia should enhance trade integration, stabilize inflation and attract responsible FDI to stimulate household demand and welfare. Data limitations beyond 2022 and unavailable variables like remittances or social services present future research opportunities. This study investigates the relationship between trade openness and private consumption in Somalia, a fragile and heavily import-dependent economy. Using annual data from 1980 to 2022 and advanced econometric techniques (ARDL, CCR, and DOLS), the research demonstrates that trade openness, economic growth, and foreign direct investment significantly enhance private consumption, while domestic investment exerts a negative effect. By highlighting the dual role of openness in expanding consumer access to goods and shaping broader macroeconomic dynamics, the study provides critical insights for policymakers seeking to balance growth, investment, and household welfare. The findings contribute to the limited body of literature on fragile states, offering evidence-based guidance for promoting inclusive economic development and resilience in Somalia and similar contexts.

This study analyzes the nexus of trade, government expenditure, and private consumption with the economic progression of an emerging economy such as India. This could be attributed to a shift in trade, government expenditure, and consumption patterns due to multiple disruptions in the Indian economy in the form of recession, digitalization, demonetization, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The study variables were Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP), net trade, government expenditure, and private consumption expenditure. The study was conducted on quarterly observations from 2000 to 2022 from India using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and error correction methods to analyze the relationship among the variables. The analysis found net trade and consumption to be significant variables for determining economic growth. RGDP, net trade, government expenditure, and private consumption expenditure do not jointly move together in the long term, and short-run causality exists from private consumption expenditure to GDP. The error correction term was negative and significant, suggesting mean reversion. The residual analysis suggested an unbiased model that is stable, homoscedastic and free from serial correlation. This research work explores the dynamic relationship between trade, government expenditure, private consumption, and economic growth in India, particularly in the context of recent disturbances such as demonetization, digitalization, and the COVID-19 pandemic. By engaging autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and error correction methods, the study divulges that private consumption expenditure and net trade are substantial determinants of economic growth, with short-run causality from consumption to GDP. However, the variables do not exhibit long-term co-movement, suggesting that economic policies must adapt to changing conditions and meet the requirement of time. The findings emphasize the importance of private consumption in driving economic growth, highlighting the need for government initiatives to boost income, especially during economic slowdowns. The study also emphasizes the limited impact of government expenditure on growth during the analyzed period, possibly due to reduced spending. These insights are crucial for policymakers aiming to design effective fiscal and monetary strategies in post-pandemic recovery. The research contributes to the literature by providing a nuanced understanding of the interplay between key economic variables in an era of continuous disruption.

European Consumer Confidence Indicator (CCI) is conceptualized as a measure of prevailing consumer sentiment and a coincident indicator of private consumption. At the beginning of 2019, the European Commission (EC) changed the CCI’s methodology after more than 18 years of use, opening room for an evaluation. We construct an extensive set of more than 86 million alternatives to European CCI and provide detailed performance analysis focusing on correlations, residuals’ descriptive diagnostics, and success in tracking consumption’s direction of change. We propose inspecting the contribution of all survey questions (both 12 monthly and 3 quarterly), alternative monthly to quarterly transformations, alternative approaches to standardization, and allowing survey balances to enter the computation formula both with a positive and a negative sign. Almost all results imply that EC’s methodological change to new official CCI relies on stronger theoretical foundations and enhances the predictive power of CCI. The correlations with private consumption are higher than before while the success rate in tracking the direction of change is similar as before. However, the new CCI can be even more precise in capturing the direction of change up to 20–30%. Correlation values imply a possible improvement of up to 9% from the new CCI and suggest guidelines for further improvements. Expected spending on durable goods is the most relevant survey question for constructing CCI.

The discovery of Neolithic houses at Durrington Walls that are contemporary with the main construction phase of Stonehenge raised questions as to their interrelationship. Was Durrington Walls the residence of the builders of Stonehenge? Were the activities there more significant than simply domestic subsistence? Using lipid residue analysis, this paper identifies the preferential use of certain pottery types for the preparation of particular food groups and differential consumption of dairy and meat products between monumental and domestic areas of the site. Supported by the analysis of faunal remains, the results suggest seasonal feasting and perhaps organised culinary unification of a diverse community.

Policymakers in small open economies need reliable signals of incipient private consumption downturns, yet traditional indicators are revised, noisy, and often arrive too late. This study develops a Romanian-specific early warning system that combines a time-varying parameter VAR with stochastic volatility and exogenous drivers (TVP-SV-VARX) with modern machine learning classifiers. The structural layer extracts regime-dependent anomalies in the macro-financial transmission to household demand, while the learning layer transforms these anomalies into calibrated probabilities of short-term consumption declines. A strictly time-based evaluation design with rolling blocks, purge and embargo periods, and rare-event metrics (precision–recall area under the curve, PR-AUC, and Brier score) underpins the assessment. The best-performing specification, a TVP-filtered random forest, attains a PR-AUC of 0.87, a ROC-AUC of 0.89, a median warning lead of one quarter, and no false positives at the chosen operating point. A sparse logistic calibration model improves probability reliability and supports transparent communication of risk bands. The time-varying anomaly layer is critical: ablation experiments that remove it lead to marked losses in discrimination and recall. For implementation, the paper proposes a three-tier WATCH–AMBER–RED scheme with conservative multi-signal confirmation and coverage gates, designed to balance lead time against the political cost of false alarms. The framework is explicitly predictive rather than causal and is tailored to data-poor environments, offering a practical blueprint for demand-side macroeconomic early warning in Romania and, by extension, other small open economies.

We explored how consumer attitudes toward service delivery types (self-service technology vs. face-to-face) differ in a private consumption context depending on the brand personality (underdog brand vs. top- dog brand). Using banking service (Study 1) and hotel service (Study 2) scenarios, we empirically investigated the interaction effects between service delivery types and brand personalities on consumer attitudes. The results indicate that for humanized underdog brands consumers showed a more positive attitude toward self-service technologies than toward face-to-face services. However, for the top-dog brands there were no significant moderation effects. Thus, when managers in the marketing field are planning to regulate new directions for their service policy, they need to be very cautious by considering both consumption context and brand personality. We have theoretically and practically expanded the existing literature on service delivery by focusing on private consumption services.

Purpose:  The purpose of this study is to investigate the macroeconomic forces that have been driving the Indian economy during both the pre-reform and post-reform eras, that is, from 1950-1951 to 1990-1991 and from 1991-1992 to 2022-2023 respectively.  Problem:  The Indian economy underwent significant economic and financial sector reforms in 1991-92, with the goal of reviving its stagnant growth.  These reforms are intended to spur the economic growth of India.  What were the main forces behind the Indian economy before and after the reforms? Is the research question.  The goal of the current study is to determine if the economic reforms shifted or maintained the pre-reform era’s driving forces for the Indian economy in the post-reform era.  Design/Methodology/Approach:  The gross domestic product (GDP), the gross domestic savings (GDS), the private consumption expenditure (PFCE), the government final consumption expenditure (GFCE),  the inflation rate, the exchange rate, the exports, the imports, the internal and external borrowings of the government, personal remittances, foreign direct investment (FDI), and foreign portfolio investments (FPI) are all taken into consideration in order to fill the research gap that has been identified as a result of the comprehensive review of the literature.  Following an analysis of the selected variables' fundamental characteristics, an econometric model is developed using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds Test Model.  Findings: There is no evidence of long-run causation and association between the variables, but the findings of the ARDL Bounds Test showed that in the pre-reform period, PFCE is the major driver of the GDP in the short-run, with strong support from imports.  However, since the reform, PFCE, GDS, and Exports are the primary short- and long-term contributors to GDP.  Practical Implication: These findings indicate that India's macroeconomic system is shifting.  The Indian economy has undergone a dramatic shift, moving away from a reliance on imports and toward one that is consumer-driven and export-driven. As savings and consumer expenditures are the main drivers of the Indian economy’s growth in the post-reform era, policies should be designed to increase savings and consumption as well as increase exports.