The Decline in Private Saving Rates in the 1990s in OECD Countries : How Much Can be Explained by Non-Wealth Determinants?

Alain de Serres ; Florian Pelgrin

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

关键词: private saving;    wealth effects;    panel estimates;   

DOI  :  https://doi.org/10.1787/241254248236

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: OECD iLibrary

【 摘 要 】

The substantial decline in private-sector saving rates observed in several OECD countries in the late 1990s coincided in several cases with a sharp increase in household financial net worth. This was seen by many observers as evidence that the strong rise in equity and residential property prices during the late 1990s had been treated by households as a permanent increase in wealth, leading to an unsustainable drop in saving and raising fears of an eventual negative wealth effect. Applying estimation techniques for systems of dynamic panel equations, this paper looks at basic determinants of private saving for a sample of 15 OECD countries and finds that the sharp decline in saving observed after 1995 can be largely explained, even in a post-sample fashion, by fundamentals other than financial wealth. Among the determinants, the rise in public-sector saving is found to have contributed the most to the decline in private saving between 1995 and 2000. Based on this ...