The bar chart below shows shares of expenditures for five major categories in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan in the year 2009. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

The chart illustrates expenses for different major categories including food, housing, transportation,

health

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care

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and clothing in four nations in 2009.

Overall

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, consumers spent the largest proportion of their earnings on housing

while

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the opposite was true for

health

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care

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and clothing. It can be seen that citizens in the US allocated the majority of their budget to housing, with above 25%

whereas

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that of food and transportation were significantly less, with 15% and 18% respectively.

Similarly

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, the shares of expenditure for housing accounted for the biggest proportion of total expenditure in Canada, the UK and Japan at about 20%, 24% and 22% respectively. It is

also

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noticeable that the figure for food in Japan represented the largest percentage of total expenses, at 20%, which doubled that for transportation in

this

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country. The opposite trend can be seen in

health

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care

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and clothing, residents in all nations spent only approximately 5% of their expenditures on clothing. Out of four countries, the UK used about 2% of the budget for

health

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care

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, which was the lowest percentage compared to that of the remaining nations, at approximately 6%.