India - Household Consumer Expenditure Survey: 64th Round, Schedule 1.0, July 2007 - June 2008

Face-to-face [f2f] Household consumer expenditure is measured as the expenditure incurred by a household on domestic account during a specified period, called reference period. It includes the imputed values of goods and services, which are not purchased but procured otherwise for consumption. In other words, it is the sum total of monetary values of all the items (i.e. goods and services) consumed by the household on domestic account during the reference period. The imputed rent of owner-occupied houses is excluded from consumption expenditure. Any expenditure incurred towards the productive enterprises of the households is also excluded from household consumer expenditure.
To make the definition of household consumption operational, clear guidelines are needed not only on what is included in household consumer expenditure and what is excluded, but also on
(a) the identification of the household performing each act of consumption
(b) the assigning of a time to of each act of consumption.
Only then can one attempt to record the consumption of a household H within a reference period P.
It has been found convenient to assign different meanings of the word “consumption” (and hence different approaches to its measurement) for different categories of consumption items.