Will Employment Effect Gold Buying? An Indian Perspective

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.