Housing gets bigger share of Hong Kong residents’ expenditure

Spending on housing and food goes up while residents cut expenses on transport and on clothing and footwear.

The share of household expenditure on housing has increased from 29.17% to 31.66% and that on food from 26.94% to 27.45% from 2004-05 to 2009-10.

These are the results of the Census & Statistics Department’s latest household expenditure survey announced on Thursday.

The share on transport fell from 9.09% to 8.44% and that on clothing and footwear decreased from 3.91% to 3.45%.

All other sectors recorded decreases in expenditure shares, including electricity, gas and water, alcohol and tobacco, durable goods, miscellaneous goods and miscellaneous services.

Acting Commissioner for Census & Statistics Lily Ou-yang said it is a regular exercise to update the expenditure brackets and expenditure weights for the consumer price indices every five years by conducting a household expenditure survey.

“Compared with the old (2004/05-based) CPI series, the new (2009/10-based) CPI series generally shows smaller year-on-year rates of increase. This is because when the prices of various goods and services change, households tend to buy more of the goods and services with relatively smaller price increases to substitute those with larger price increases.

“While the magnitudes of the year-on-year changes in the 2004/05-based and 2009/10-based CPIs are slightly different, the general increasing trend in the consumer prices from the fourth quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011 is observed in all the four new CPI series, as it is in the old CPI series.”