RIEB, Kobe University

Sources of Global Heterogeneity in Retail Spending

Economies worldwide vary greatly in terms of how much their consumers spend on various types of retail activities. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the regulatory characteristics as well as the natures and strategies of businesses are related to retail spending. We employed random effect time series cross sectional (TSCS) models linear in parameters for forty-eight economies using annual data for the 1999-2008 period. The results provided strong support that economic freedom, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow and concentration of retail stores in an economy positively affect retail spending. We also found that tax and social security contributions as a proportion of the GDP is positively related to per capita grocery retail spending. A lack of data for a large number of economies, especially less developed ones potentially provides a limitation of this paper.