Maria Fernanda Varejao Velten, Thi Minh Chau Nguyen & Regina Kapiturova
Final assignment for the “Data Analysis” course in the Public and Corporate Communication Master’s program, curriculum in Data Analytics for Politics, Society and Complex Organizations, 2022-2023, University of Milano. Instructor: Giulia Dotti Sani
Introduction, literature review, and hypotheses
Nowadays, wealth is one of the major issues affecting our society. According to Oxfam, 2153 billionaires have the same wealth as the poorest 4.6 billion people in the world. The report also focuses on the financial gap between the sexes as it is stated that “Worldwide, men own 50% more wealth than women” (Oxfam International, 2020).
Age is also a critical variable: consumers under the age of 35 account for 78% and 74% of luxury retail sales, accounting for 35% of global luxury purchases in 2019 (World Luxury Association, 2021).
Finally, according to the Deloitte report, one of the parameters affecting the purchasing power of luxury in a country is GDP (Deloitte, 2018).
The aim of this short paper is to examine gender and generational differences in opinions towards the importance of being rich, having money, and expensive things using European Social Survey data (round 9 – 2018).
The hypotheses are the following:
- H1: Inhabitants of countries with low GDP per capita value being rich, have money and expensive things more than inhabitants of countries with high GDP per capita.
- H2: Men value being rich, having money, and expensive things more than women
- H3: Younger generations value being rich, having money, and expensive things more than older ones
Through our analysis, our expectations have been mostly confirmed; in fact, the level of concern regarding being rich, having money, and expensive things seems to be associated with gender and in most cases also with age.
Data and method
For our analysis we use data from Round 9 of the European Social Survey collected in 2018. Our attention will be focused on the dependent categorical variable “Important to be rich, have money and expensive things”, which includes six possible outcomes. We recoded it into 3 groups:
- 1 = Like me (which includes “Very much like me” and “Like me”)
- 2 = A bit like me (which includes “Somewhat like me” and “A little like me”)
- 3 = Not like me (which includes “Not like me” and “Not like me at all”)
The independent variables chosen are gender and age. The analysis will be limited to people aged 15 to 57 recoded into 3 generational groups:
- Gen Z (15-25): people born from 1997 to 2012
- Millennials (26-41): people born from 1981 to 1996
- Gen X (42-57): people born from 1965 to 1980
The analysis will consider three European countries with different degrees of quality of life: Ireland, Italy, and Bulgaria. According to the 2021 ranking, Ireland is the second-highest GDP per capita in the European Union. In the middle of the ranking is Italy, and Bulgaria records the lowest GDP per capita. All the missing observations about the considered variables are dropped.
| COUNTRY | GDP VALUE (2021) |
| Ireland | 135,682.8 |
| Italy | 35,551.3 |
| Bulgaria | 11,635 |
Results
H1: Inhabitants of countries with low GDP per capita value being rich, have money and expensive things more than inhabitants of countries with high GDP per capita.
To test the first hypothesis, we compare the proportion of respondents who value wealth among the three countries. When looking at the population that aims towards being rich, that is the upper categories “like me” and “a bit like me”, we can see that Italy has more citizens that value being rich, having money, and expensive things than the others.
However, Italy is not the country with the lowest GDP. So, the gradient in GDP per capita doesn’t reflect the slope in viewpoints toward being rich. But, when considering only the category “Like me”, the interpretation changes. Bulgaria, the country with the lowest GDP per capita is indeed the country that has the highest mean value.
H2: Men value being rich, having money, and expensive things more than women
To test the second hypothesis, we used the chi2 test since we are comparing two categorical variables. The null hypothesis is that there is no association between gender and concern over being rich, while the alternative hypothesis would be that such an association is indeed present.
| GENDER | Like me | A bit like me | Not like me | Total |
| Men | 16.01% | 51.91% | 32.08% | 100% |
| Women | 10.85% | 47.71% | 41.44% | 100% |
Table 2. Gender difference in concern about being rich Chi Square test result in Bulgaria, Italy and Ireland. Pearson chi2(4) = 45.9245 Pr = 0.000
The value of the Chi-Square is high and the corresponding Probability is 0.00 < 0.05. So, we can reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there exists an association between gender and concern about being rich in the population. We also note from the percentages that men value being rich more than women.
To deepen our analysis, we conduct a chi-square test for each country. Results can be found in Table 3 below:
| BULGARIA | ITALY | IRELAND | |||||||
| Like me | A bit | Not like | Like me | A bit | Not like | Like me | A bit | Not like | |
| MEN | 19.25% | 44.31% | 36.44% | 15.56% | 64.80% | 19.64% | 13.85% | 40.50% | 45.65% |
| WOMEN | 12.36% | 47.23% | 40.41% | 11.34% | 60.19% | 28.47% | 9.12% | 33.33% | 57.55% |
| Chi 2 Pr | 9.2939 0.010 | 19.7110 0.000 | 19.1068 0.000 | ||||||
As we can see in the table, in all countries we can reject the null hypothesis since the P-value is lower than 0.05, meaning that gender is associated with the interest in being wealthy, with men more likely to be focused on being rich than women.
However, as can be seen from Figure 2 below, if we look at the population that aims towards being rich more (the upper categories “like me” and “a bit like me”), the gender gap is slightly different among the three countries with Italy and Ireland proving to have a more evident gap compared to Bulgaria, where women and men have overall more similar views on the topic.
H3: Younger people value being rich, having money, and expensive things more than older people due to generation issues
Table 4 below reports the results of the chi2 test ran on the pooled sample to investigate the association between age and concern for being rich.
| Age | Like me | A bit | Not like | total |
| Gen Z | 19.38% | 54.73% | 25.89% | 100% |
| Millennials | 14.63% | 50.63% | 34.74% | 100% |
| GenX | 10.11% | 47.18% | 42.71% | 100% |
Table 4. Age differences in concern about being rich. Chi-Square test results in Bulgaria, Italy, and Ireland. Pearson chi2(4) = 82.0727 Pr = 0.000
The null hypothesis is that there is no association between age and opinion toward being rich. The value of the Chi-Square is high and the p-value is 0.00 < 005 indicating an association between generations and attitudes towards being wealthy.
We try to further investigate the issue by looking into the generation gap in each country. Table 5 below reports the results of a chi-square test to investigate the association between age and concern for being rich in 3 countries, while Figure 3 below visualizes our analysis.
Generally, younger respondents (Gen Z) seem to value wealth more than older respondents (both Millenials and Gen X). However, the generational difference is less pronounced in Italy, compared to Bulgaria and Ireland.
| Bulgaria | Italy | Ireland | |||||||
| Like me | A bit | Not like | Like me | A bit | Not like | Like me | A bit | Not like | |
| GEN Z | 31.98% | 42.44% | 25.58% | 14.91% | 64.33% | 20.76% | 15.43% | 47.53% | 37.04% |
| MILLENNIALS | 16.34% | 48.69% | 34.97% | 14.97% | 63.53% | 21.50% | 13.27% | 38.85% | 47.88% |
| GEN X | 10.05% | 45.34% | 44.61% | 11.60% | 60.80% | 27.60% | 8.23% | 31.39% | 60.38% |
| CHI 2 PR | 55.1737 0.000 | 10.8101 0.000 | 35.9304 0.000 | ||||||
Conclusions
To conclude, we aimed to examine gender and generational differences in opinion towards the importance of being rich, having money, and expensive things using European Social Survey data from 2018. We can state that our analysis has confirmed most of our hypotheses.
The study used chi-square tests and analyzed data from three European countries – Ireland, Italy, and Bulgaria – to test three hypotheses.
The results show that the level of concern regarding being rich, having money, and having expensive things is associated with gender and age.
Men value being rich, having money, and expensive things more than women.
Younger generations also value being rich, having money, and expensive things more than older people.
The GDP per capita is also a factor concerning the viewpoints towards being rich. However, among these 3 countries, we don’t see any linear correlation. More research is probably needed to investigate this difference.
REFERENCES
Deloitte. 2018. “Global Powers of Luxury Goods.” https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/at/Documents/consumer-business/deloitte-global-powers-of-luxury-goods-2018.pdf.
Oxfam International. 2020. “Report on Global Inequality.” https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/global-wealth-inequality-is-founded-on-sexism-oxfam-international.html.
World Luxury Association. 2021. “Analysis of Luxury Brand and Consumer Psychology.” Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, volume 178, 44.
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