The postwar period, and especially the past fifteen years, have brought major
changes in housing standards and household equipment in Yugoslav rural areas.
Although of considerable proportions, these changes have not eliminated the existing
differences between the urban and the rural populations.
The diffusion and adoption of individual innovations in housing and household
equipment do not show a trend which would fit a rational concept of life. For
certain basic items of housing culture are much less widespread than are most of
the innovations in household equipment (labour-saving devices, objects which
serve leisure and amusement, etc.).
The changing structure of consuption shows a slower increase of expenditure
for the »basic« necessities of life (although the extent of the satisfaction of these
necessities is still comparatively small and unsatisfactory) and a much faster
growth of expenditure for certain »derived« necessities. In relation to the increase
of the total financial resources available one may speak of a growing tendency
towards consumption.
The process of goods accumulation is thus evidently in progress. It is promoted
by the existing conditions where the economic strength of the rural population
still is considerably smaller than its possibilities for realizing its aspirations, where
the satisfaction of the »basic« necessities is either growing at a slow rate or
stagnating, and where the rural population is adopting the accumulation of goods
as one of the basic criteria of what is called social prestige. The intercausative influence
of these factors has opened the way for the growing orientation towards
consumption
