TITLE:
Will Employment Effect Gold Buying? An Indian Perspective
AUTHORS:
Swati Shrikant Godbole, Gita Sashidharan
KEYWORDS:
India, Gold Buying, Reference Group-Employment Function, ANOVA, Tukey Post Hoc Test
JOURNAL NAME:
Theoretical Economics Letters,
Vol.9 No.5,
May
8,
2019
ABSTRACT: In India, the uniqueness of gold has been widely discussed
since ages. The Indian Government has led several initiatives to curb gold
consumption in order to restrict its impact on trade deficit and forex
reserves. However, their attempts have been quite futile. In light of the above
and combined with the high demand for gold in the form of jewelry, this
research paper was crafted. This paper attempts to study the factors of gold
buying of retail consumers and also analyze the impact of reference groups on
gold buying. The central focus of the study being retail consumers, data were
collected from a sample of 600 retail consumers. Several factors were
identified through factor analysis. The validity and reliability of factor
analysis was confirmed by KMO (0.903) and Bartlet tests (Sig. 0.000). ANOVA was
performed to ascertain the impact of reference groups/employment function on
the identified factors. The ANOVA results indicated that the proposed
hypothesis was observed to be statistically significant for some of the
identified factors. Results of Tukey Post Hoc Test highlighted pairing of other
function (retired) of employment with either Marketing or IT giving
statistically significant different means. For several years, gold has been an
area of secondary research both in the foreign and Indian context. However in
the light of gold buying’s (Jewelry) negative impact on India’s trade deficit
and various initiatives of the government, this research has relevance in the
Indian context. More so since in the existing era, India is a growing economy
and globalization and technology has made it easy and possible to buy or invest
in the paper form of gold instead of the physical form.