The Structural Influences on the Urban and Rural Residents' Spiritual Consumption in China after China's Entry into WTO

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, consumption structure between urban and rural residents were studied respectively, and a comparison between urban and rural residents was further made regarding to the influences of the consumption structure on spiritual consumption structure. The results show that, urban residents spend more disposable income on education, entertainment and cultural than rural residents. The model of residents' spiritual consumption has obvious structural changes since China's accession to WTO, and accession to WTO has greater impact on urban residents' spiritual consumption. However, rural people's demand for consumption of education and entertainment increases faster than urban residents, and the gap between rural and urban consumption is gradually being narrowed. Significance of StudySince the beginning of 21st century, China's economy has embarked on a new stage, along with the accelerating transformation of production structure and consumption structure. According to the census data of the past 20 years [1], Chinese people have been paying more and more attention to the expenditure on entertainment, culture, education and other services, which means that with the continuous development of economy and the improvement of quality of people's life, the proportion of material consumption and spiritual consumption, namely, the structure of consumption has undergone significant changes.Spiritual consumption, which emerges because of economic growth, is the consumption of some intangible goods, such as entertainment, culture, education and other services [2,3]. This kind of consumption not only reflects the income level, spending power and living standard of our people, but also has close relations with people's quality of life and happiness index, which deserve more attention in the new stage of development. Besides, spiritual consumption also plays an important role for the development of entire economic society [4]. For example, the impact of the consumption of education on the improvement of the quality of citizens can not be ignored, which can help the whole society make progress in enhancing both technical quality and cultural quality. Therefore, it is urgent and necessary for us to make researches on spiritual consumption in order to improve people's happiness index, meet the increasing consumer demand with a more reasonable allocation of resources and promote the rational development of economic structure.Since accession to WTO in 2000, the openness of China has been expanding significantly, which strengthens our economic cooperation and communication with foreign countries, promotes economic prosperity and transformation and brings more advanced technology and capital, resulting in a series of positive influences [5,6,7]. However, does it really improve the quality of life of our people? What kind of impact does it have on spiritual consumption? On one hand, accession to WTO promotes economic development, increases people's income and has some impact on people's 20