Consumer spending in World War II: the forgotten consumer expenditure surveys

Consumer spending in World War II: the forgotten consumer expenditure surveys To help mark the Monthly Labor Review's 100th year, the editors invited several producers and users of BLS data to take a look back at the last 100 years.This article looks at two published but often neglected wartime consumer expenditure surveys-one that covered expenditures in 1941 and the first 3 months of 1942 and another that covered expenditures only of urban households in 1944-to place them into the historical context of changes in consumer spending patterns from the 1930s through 2013.Shortly after the December 1941 entry of the United States into the Second World War, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics 1 conducted a survey to provide estimates of expenditures and savings by income class for the entire nation.The results of this survey, "Family spending and saving in wartime"published with initial data in the September and October 1942 issues of the Monthly Labor Review and published with final data as BLS bulletin 822 in 1945-covered two time periods: all of 1941 and then the first 3 months of 1942.A second report, "Income and spending and saving of city families in wartime," bulletin 724, Monthly Labor Review, September 1942, highlighted the differences in U.S. spending for urban families before and after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war.Then in 1944 the survey was repeated for urban households to see how spending changed, and the results were published in "Expenditures and savings of city families in 1944," serial no.R. 1818, Monthly Labor Review, January 1946.However, after being discussed in articles in the 1942 and 1946 Monthly Labor Review (MLR), the consumer expenditure surveys collected during the Second World War faded from history.The historic information has long been overlooked in Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) spending summariesthe World War II studies were not mentioned in the BLS Handbook of Methods prior to the pending 2015 updateand almost no mention in the several historical articles by BLS describing survey results over the decades. 2 The expenditure data and income information contained in their tables are not available in any BLS online document.