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The paper focuses on durable goods and their role in the measurement of living standards. The paper reviews the theoretical underpinnings of the methods available to estimate the value of the services flowing from consumer durable goods. It also provides a unified framework that encompasses the acquisition approach, the rental equivalent approach, and the user cost approach. The pros and cons of each method are discussed in the context of poverty and inequality analysis and it is argued that the user cost should receive the highest consideration.

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The paper argues that household budgets are the best starting point for investigating a number of big questions related to the evolution of the living standards during the last two-three centuries. If one knows where to look, historical family budgets are more abundant than might be suspected. And statistical techniques have been developed to handle the associated problems of small, incomplete, and unrepresentative samples. We introduce the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) Project, aimed at gathering data and sources, but also at creating an informational infrastructure that provides i) reliable storage and easy access to historical family budget data, along with ii) tools to configure the data as it is entered so as to harmonise it with present-day surveys.

We propose a model in which money performs an essential role in the process of exchange, despite the presence of a multilateral clearing house that collects resources from and distributes them to anonymous agents. Money improves the functioning of the clearing house, simultaneously keeping the incentives to contribute and guaranteeing the fine-tuning of allocations.