SERVICE EXPENDITURES IN CURRENT PRICES

I describe in this appendix the estimation of five types of service expenditures not included either in retail sales or in rental payments, namely, payments for transportation, communication, domestic service, personal medical care, and utilities. Some of these categories (transportation, medical care) can be estimated with a good degree of accuracy; others (communications, domestic service, utilities) can only be approximated. Nevertheless, I would doubt that large intertemporal errors are involved.

Railroad travel

Data on passenger expenditures for rail travel are available in considerable detail thanks to the excellent system of data reporting for the Russian railroad system. The figures cited in Table C.1 are for gross sales of rail tickets to passengers for the Russian Empire and are drawn from various sources cited at the bottom of the table.

This calculation of consumer transportation expenditures is likely biased in two opposing directions. A portion of passenger rail expenditures is intermediate in nature (business trips) and should be netted out, but I would imagine such intermediate expenditures to be a relatively small fraction of the total. On the other hand, transportation expenditures on other forms of transport (horse-drawn coach, water, etc.) are not included, but these should be small as well. In the absence of better information, I assume that these two items offset each other.

Communication (telephone, telegraph, post)

Personal (as opposed to business) expenditures for communication services cannot be estimated with precision because of the difficulty of differentiating private from business expenditures.