Percentage of GDP currently and historically spent on luxuries?

July 5, 2007 11:46 PM

Are there any statistics on what portion of the US GDP is now and historically (over the past 100 or 200 years) has been spent on luxury goods? I'll refrain from defining that term and hope that any studies referenced will do the work for me. Any international comparisons would be greatly appreciated as well.
posted by shivohum to Work & Money (2 answers total)

According to this comparison list, a book with a lot of answers along those lines would be Where We Stand.

(there was also a frightening number of Google results that seemed to imply that Healthcare in the U.S. was considered a "luxury item")
posted by revmitcz at 1:42 AM on July 6, 2007

I think Elizabeth Warren at Harvard has been doing some work on this - maybe not going back quite that far but for the 20th century.
posted by yarrow at 3:47 PM on July 6, 2007