Article In Press | Published on: May 11, 2026
Volume: 2, Issue: 1
1. Amity School of Engineering and Technology, Amity University Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
2. Amity Institute of Liberal Arts, Amity University Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
DOI: null
Corresponding Author: Arshad Bhat, Amity Institute of Liberal Arts, Amity University Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
Citation: S Malode, Y Gavali, Y Jadhav, A Bhat. (2026). An Econometric Analysis of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Consumption in India. Journal of Business Studies and Marketing Research. RPC Publishers. 2(1)1-5.
Copyright: © 2026 Arshad Bhat, this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between the adoption of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and aggregate consumption in India, specifically to determine whether the advent of UPI has significantly influenced consumption patterns beyond existing payment instruments. To investigate this, the researchers compared the impact of various payment mechanisms including UPI, credit cards, prepaid payment instruments (PPI), point-of-sale (POS) terminals and debit cards on Private Final Consumption Expenditure (PFCE). These were plotted along the X‑axis against PFCE on the Y‑axis to isolate the relative contribution of each factor. The results were surprising: contrary to the widely held assumption that UPI’s frictionless design stimulates additional spending, the study found no statistically significant incremental effect of UPI on consumption. While UPI transaction volume grew by over 100% year‑on‑year, its coefficient in the consumption model was negligible (β = 0.03, p > 0.05). In contrast, credit card transactions showed a strong and significant association with PFCE (β = 0.42, p < 0.01), indicating that credit cards exert a substantially greater influence on consumption growth. The key insight emerging from the analysis is that UPI appears to have altered the method of payment rather than the magnitude of expenditure. In other words, UPI has successfully digitised a large volume of transactions, it has not independently generated new consumption a distinction with important implications for both policy and macroeconomic forecasting. write future perspective in two lines.
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