  We study unit-level expenditure on consumption across multiple countries and
multiple years, in order to extract invariant features of consumption
distribution. We show that the bulk of it is lognormally distributed, followed
by a power law tail at the limit. The distributions coincide with each other
under normalization by mean expenditure and log scaling even though the data is
sampled across multiple dimension including, e.g., time, social structure and
locations. This phenomenon indicates that the dispersions in consumption
expenditure across various social and economic groups are significantly similar
subject to suitable scaling and normalization. Further, the results provide a
measurement of the core distributional features. Other descriptive factors
including those of sociological, demographic and political nature, add further
layers of variation on the this core distribution. We present a stochastic
multiplicative model to quantitatively characterize the invariance and the
distributional features.
