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The objective of this paper is to present the conceptual framework and some empirical results of our work at the Federal Agricultural Research Centre in Braunschweig in relation to the description of the current ‘rural way of life’ in the Federal Republic.1–3 A quantitative analysis of the ‘way of life’is attempted by examining the ‘subsistence technology’ used by rural survey households and their achieved ‘real consumption’.

This contribution attempts to identify effects of residential location of rural family households on their economic behaviour. Economic behaviour is understood to be reflected in the total spectrum of income and allocation of household resources. A holistic approach must go beyond activity on the labour and consumer markets and include non‐market (‘informal’) activities of household members, taking into account domestic production of goods and services, interaction within social networks, the use of public commercial infrastructure, etc. The cost of living depends, among other things, on patterns of consumption, on regional price levels for consumer breadbaskets, as well as on costs involved in reaching public and commercial points of distribution. These factors result themselves from the interplay of economic forces giving rise to identifiable ‘economic territories’ and ‘market areas’ and ultimately to observable consumptive behaviour and ‘activity spaces’ of individual private households. Since data was available only for our rural survey households, comparative analysis of locational aspects was limited to consumption expenditures for which data could be found in administrative statistics for households in urban and periurban areas. The rural survey sample was found to have a higher average level and a different structure of expenditures when compared with their non‐rural counterparts. At the same time, a preliminary effort was made in our own rural survey sample to determine the importance of non‐market consumption for rural households. This included household consumption of domestic self‐services (‘housework’), the utility value of owner‐occupied dwellings, do‐it‐yourself production of substitutes for commercial goods and services, and exchanges within social networks. Results of this initial investigation of non‐market elements of the household economy indicated that they were very important for the household's level‐of‐living and that they had a potential for compensating inequalities due to different degrees of access to market resources. Household strategies for optimizing their resource allocation to both market and non‐market consumption were also examined. In general, ‘objective’ criteria and ‘subjective’ assessments by the survey households with respect to living conditions in rural Western Germany were found to give a positive image of rural life; however, differences in resource allocation strategies for market consumption between urban and rural households having been confirmed above, the question remains for future research about possible locational differences in household acquisition and use of non‐market resources.

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