Crisis or decline? The restructuring of Italian household expenditure in 1997-2011

The paper deals with the increasing economic difficulties that since the end of the ‘90s Italian families are facing. Instead of the usual income approach, the analysis is based on the Italian Household Budget survey, aiming to assess the changes in the levels and in the patterns of consumption expenditure over the last 15 years (1997-2011). The data on consumption are rarely used in the European socio-economic analysis and quite neglected in the Italian context, but they can catch the living conditions of families even better than income data as they account not only for households’ available resources but also for households’ actual expenditure choices and constraints. The driving hypothesis is that the decline and the restructuring of Italian households’ expenditure patterns far from being a direct consequence of the global crisis is a structural trend connected to the socio-economic decline of the country that the crisis has rather sharpened. In the first part of the paper document sthe extent of the cutback that hit the Italian families, and which types of household were most penalized. In the second part the paper goes deeper in the analysis of the structure of expenses – how the expenditure is split up in different categories of goods and services - and of the strategies of adaptation of households’ budgets to reduced economic resources.