While the issues of purchasing power, high cost of living and constrained expenses are at the center of the public debate, we asked ourselves what place digital technology occupies in the household budget.
The main source of data for household budget issues is the "Family Budget" survey conducted every six years by INSEE. Without waiting for the 2016-17 survey, data from the 2011 survey are available.
Two approaches can be used: the approach in terms of the structure of household expenditures and the approach in terms of constrained expenditures (pre-committed expenditures in the vocabulary of INSEE).
The share of communication expenses in the household budget varies according to the CSP
The INSEE household budget survey allows us to estimate the weight of digital expenses in the household budget.The INSEE nomenclature isolates "Communications" expenditures (which include postal services, purchases of telephones and fax machines, telephone and Internet services and telephone top-ups) as well as "audiovisual, photographic and computer equipment".
The results of the Family Budget survey show significant differences according to socio-professional categories for communication expenses. These represented 3.7% of a farmer's budget compared to 3.8% for a worker, 4.1% for an employee and 2.6% for an executive.
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The differences are smaller for spending on audiovisual, photographic and computer equipment, which in 2011 represented 1.1% of a farmer's budget compared to 1.4% for a worker, and 1.9% for an executive.
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Communication expenses represented 3.3% of the household budget, with a peak of 4.2% for single-parent families.
The share of telephone and Internet subscriptions in the disposable income of poor households reaches 5%.
Qualified by INSEE as "pre-committed expenditure", forced expenditure actually represents all household expenditure made within the framework of a "contract that is difficult to renegotiate in the short term". In other words, they can be changed only at the cost of effort or hard negotiation, and represent a stable and predictable capital outflow. INSEE classifies in this category expenditures related to housing, such as rent, water, fuel or electricity, as well as financial services, television, insurance or telecommunication services.First, according to INSEE, the weight of constrained expenses, which rose from 12.4% of disposable income in 1951 to nearly 30% on average in 2017, has continued to increase in a movement that is explained for "more than three quarters" by the rise in housing-related costs.
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Subscriptions represented 2% of disposable income (income and social benefits received after deducting direct taxes) for a well-off household, compared to 5% for a poor household.
1492 euros per year for subscriptions to digital services
According to a study conducted at the end of 2016 by Opinion Way on behalf of Sofinco, the French spent an average of 1,092 euros per year on their technology-related subscriptions (internet and telephone subscriptions, cable, gaming or download platforms, etc.) the French spend an average of 1,092 euros per year, : that is, 91 euros per month (+ 4 euros compared to last year).According to the same survey, they spent an average of 416 euros per year on the acquisition of technological equipment and products, 18 euros more than in 2015.
Références :
Sources
- 1. INSEE: Household expenditure in 2011: Family Budget Survey
- 2. INSEE: Household spending on information economy products over the past 50 years
- 3. DREES: Inequalities in living standards are more pronounced once pre-committed expenses are taken into account
- 4. DREES: Pre-committed expenses: what weight in the household budget?
- 5. "OpinionWay survey for Sofinco
