《经济学人》题图。

During the Spring Festival holiday, which this year lasted from February 15th to 23rd, China regroups and regathers. People cross the country on fast trains to join their families, watch dancing robots on TV and hand out red packets of crisp banknotes to younger relatives. But above all, they gather to eat. In a café in Fuzhou, a southern city, locals and tourists ate cheesecake and drank kombucha. One customer ordered wontons wrapped in “swallow skin” sheets, which mash together sweet-potato starch and pounded pork. “I really like eating,” said Yu Huan, another customer, who works in fashion in Shanghai. “It’s one of the ways I obtain happiness.”
今年从2月15日持续至23日的春节假期期间，中国举国欢庆，团聚一堂。人们乘坐高铁跨越山河与家人相聚，在电视前观看机器人舞蹈，向年轻晚辈递上装满崭新钞票的红包。但最重要的是，他们围坐共餐。在南方城市福州的一家咖啡馆里，本地居民与游客品尝着芝士蛋糕，啜饮康普茶。一位顾客点了用“燕皮”包裹的馄饨——这种薄皮由红薯淀粉与捶打过的猪肉糜混合制成。“我真的很喜欢吃，”在上海从事时尚行业的顾客余欢表示，“这是我获得快乐的方式之一。”

This year the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) got into the spirit of things by revealing, for the first time, exactly how much Chinese consumers spend on food. The number emerged from a revision of the consumer-price index. The new weights imply that food (excluding dining out, booze and tobacco, with which it is often mashed together) accounted for 17.2% of household consumption last year. The equivalent figure for America was less than 8%.
今年国家统计局也应景地首次公布了精确的居民食品消费数据。这一数据源于居民消费价格指数的权重调整。新权重显示，食品（不包括外出就餐、酒类和烟草——这些常被合并统计的类别）占去年家庭消费支出的17.2%。而美国的对应数字则低于8%。

These percentages confirm China’s passion for food. But they also have a less comforting implication. China may be far ahead of America in dancing robots and high-speed trains, but it still lags far behind on one of the oldest measures of economic development: Engel’s law. It states that as their income increases, people devote a smaller share of it to sustenance. This regularity, discovered almost 170 years ago by Ernst Engel, a German economist, is one of the “most enduring relationships in economics”, according to Richard Anker of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. It can be used to predict food spending. But it can also be used in reverse, to infer incomes. Other things being equal, Engel declared, the share of outlays devoted to food is “the best measure of the material standard of living of a population”.
这些百分比印证了中国对美食的热情。但它们也揭示了一个不那么令人宽慰的含义。中国或许在机器人舞蹈和高铁领域遥遥领先于美国，但在衡量经济发展的最古老指标之一——恩格尔定律上，却仍远远落后。该定律指出，随着收入增长，人们用于维持基本生存的支出占比会下降。这一由德国经济学家恩斯特-恩格尔在约170年前发现的规律，被马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校的理查德-安克尔称为“经济学中最经久不衰的关系之一”。它既可用于预测食品支出，亦可逆向推演收入水平。恩格尔曾断言，在其他条件相同的情况下，食品支出占比是“衡量人口物质生活水平的最佳尺度”。

Engel discovered his measure in data painstakingly collected by others. Edouard Ducpétiaux, a Belgian jurist, tabulated the budgets of 199 households across all nine provinces of his country in the 1850s. Frédéric Le play, a pioneering sociologist, gleaned similar figures from 36 families across Europe, gaining their confidence through praise, small gifts and “interesting conversation”.
恩格尔的这一发现源于他人艰辛收集的数据。19世纪50年代，比利时法学家爱德华-迪克佩蒂奥统计了本国九个省份199户家庭的收支账目。先驱社会学家弗雷德里克-勒普莱则通过恭维、小礼物和“有趣的交谈”赢得信任，从欧洲36个家庭中采集了类似数据。

Ducpétiaux and Le play had “delivered the pearls”, admitted Engel, “but not the string”. What tied the data together was the consistent relationship between dosh and nosh that he spotted. Reviewing the law 150 years later, Mr Anker found the lix was still easy to discern across over 200 countries. Even China’s NBS takes it seriously. “The Engel coefficient”, it said last year, is an “important indicator for measuring the standard of living of residents”.
“他们献上了珍珠，”恩格尔坦言，“却未提供串珍珠的线。”而将这些数据串联起来的，正是他发现的收入与饮食支出之间稳定存在的关联关系。150年后重新审视这一定律时，安克尔发现这种关联在200多个国家中依然清晰可辨。甚至连中国国家统计局也高度重视该指标，曾于去年明确指出：“恩格尔系数是衡量人民生活水平的重要指标。”

Several economists trust this measure more than they trust China’s official income figures. In 2014 Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson of the University of California, Berkeley, and Miao Liu of Boston College used Engel’s finding to cast doubt on the country’s growth and inflation statistics. They compared households in 2006 with those that reached a similar income two years later. They discovered that the later households were still devoting substantially more of their budgets to food. Perhaps they were not quite as prosperous as the official figures claimed.
多位经济学家对此指标的信任度甚至超过对中国官方收入数据的信任。2014年，加州大学伯克利分校的中村恵美与约恩-斯坦松及波士顿学院的刘淼运用恩格尔的发现，对中国经济增长与通胀统计数据的准确性提出质疑。他们将2006年的家庭数据与两年后达到相似收入水平的家庭进行对比，发现后者仍将预算的显著更高比例用于食品支出。这表明这些家庭的实际富裕程度可能不及官方数据所宣称的水平。

Engel’s law is also a source of concern for Adam Wolfe of Absolute Strategy Research, a consultancy. He points out that the official Engel coefficient (which includes spending on cigarettes, alcohol and dining out, as well as food) has mysteriously stopped falling, despite China’s reported growth. These items accounted for 29.3% of consumption in 2025, the same as eight years before. This “violation” of Engel’s law, Mr Wolfe argues, suggests that China has suffered a “severe development setback”.
恩格尔定律也引起了绝对战略研究公司亚当-沃尔夫的担忧。他指出，尽管中国报告了经济增长，但官方恩格尔系数（包含香烟、酒类、外出就餐及食品支出）却已神秘地停止下降。这些项目在2025年占消费支出的29.3%，与八年前基本持平。沃尔夫认为，这种对恩格尔定律的“违背”表明中国遭受了“严重的发展挫折”。

But Engel’s law has a wrinkle: dining out. When people eat at a restaurant, café or stall, they are not just buying food. They are also paying for the cooking, washing-up and ambience. Mr Anker once did his own fieldwork to quantify this point. He bought noodles and steamed buns in street markets in xi’an, a city in western China. He also patronised McDonald’s and Outback Steakhouse in Massachusetts. Rather than eat the dishes, he weighed their ingredients, then estimated their cost. He calculated that the Chinese street food cost up to 30% more than a similar meal at home. McDonald’s cost 150% more. The steak: 233% extra.
但恩格尔定律存在一个复杂因素：外出就餐。当人们在餐馆、咖啡馆或摊位用餐时，他们购买的不仅是食物，还支付了烹饪、洗碗和环境氛围的费用。安克尔曾通过自己的实地调查来量化这一点。他在中国西部城市西安的街市购买了面条和包子，同时也在马萨诸塞州光顾了麦当劳和澳拜客牛排馆。他没有食用这些餐点，而是将食物拆解后称量其中的食材并估算其成本。他计算出，中国街头食品的价格比在家制作类似餐食高出30%；麦当劳高出150%；而牛排则高出233%。

Yu’s law
余的定律

If restaurant meals are included in calculations of Engel’s law, the weight of food spending may be overstated. But excluding them poses the opposite danger. Awkwardly, the NBS did not disclose this month how much the Chinese spend on dining out. Nor did it provide a narrower measure of food consumption, excluding dining out, for the years before 2025. That makes it hard to know whether eating out has been propping up the Engel coefficient.
若将外出就餐纳入恩格尔定律的计算，食品支出的权重可能被高估。但将其排除则面临相反的风险。令人尴尬的是，国家统计局本月并未披露中国居民在外就餐的支出金额，也未提供2025年之前剔除外出就餐的、范围更窄的食品消费衡量数据。这使得人们难以判断外出就餐是否在支撑恩格尔系数。

Figures from Wind, a financial-data platform, provide a clue. They show that restaurants and other “catering services” rose from 5% of consumption in 2017 to 7.4% in 2024 (the latest figure available). Such numbers can also be deducted from the official Engel coefficient to arrive at a narrower measure of past food spending. This calculation suggests that food’s weight was as high as 20.7% in 2017, well above the 17.2% for 2025 that the NBS has just revealed. In other words, if dining out is subtracted, food’s weight in Chinese consumption has continued to fall. The country has not broken Engel’s law after all.
金融数据平台Wind的统计数字提供了线索。数据显示，餐馆及其他“餐饮服务”在消费中的占比从2017年的5%上升至2024年（可获得的最新数据）的7.4%。这些数字也可以从官方恩格尔系数中扣除，从而得出过去更狭义的食品支出衡量值。这一计算表明，2017年食品权重曾高达20.7%，远高于国家统计局刚刚公布的2025年17.2%的水平。换言之，如果剔除外出就餐，食品在中国消费中的权重持续下降。中国终究并未打破恩格尔定律。

In Fuzhou, Ms Yu provides corroboration. She came to visit restaurants not family. She has tried seafood hotpot, peanut soup and local fish balls. “Food makes up the biggest part of my budget,” she confesses. But that’s no economic setback. She is limited less by her wallet than by her stomach. “As one person, I can’t eat that much,” she says. “So that’s why I stayed for five days.”
在福州，余女士的实例为此提供了佐证。她此行是为了去餐馆吃饭，而不是探亲。她品尝了海鲜火锅、花生汤和当地鱼丸。“食物占了我预算的最大部分，”她坦言。但这并非经济挫折。限制她的，与其说是钱包，不如说是胃口。“一个人吃不了那么多，”她说，“所以我才待了五天。”