The effect of financial liberalization on private saving is theoretically ambiguous, not only because the link between interest rate levels and saving is itself ambiguous, but also because financial liberalization is a multidimensional and phased process, sometimes involving reversals. Using principal components, we construct 25-year time-series indices of financial liberalization for each of eight developing countries: Chile, Ghana, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Turkey, and Zimbabwe. These are employed in an econometric analysis of private saving in these countries. Our results cannot offer support for the hypothesis that financial liberalization will increase saving. On the contrary, the indications are that liberalization overall—and in particular those elements that relax liquidity constraints—may be associated with a fall in saving.

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the long- and short-run correlations among saving, investment, and growth rates for 123 countries over the period 1961-94. Three results are robust across data sets and estimation methods: i) lagges saving rates are positively related to investment rates; ii) investment rates Granger cause growth rates with a negative sign; iii) growth rates Granger-cause investment with a positive sign.

While fiscal adjustment is commonly viewed as the cornerstone of macroeconomic stabilization, the effectiveness of alternative fiscal instruments in raising national saving is still poorly understood. This paper enters the debate by estimating a private consumption function that allows for two types of agents—finite horizons and liquidity constraints—and nests three different consumption hypotheses. Using a large-panel data set that includes both industrial and developing countries, we reject full Ricardian equivalence. We also find substantial differences between industrial and developing countries, regarding both the extent of Ricardian offsetting and the degree to which the government budget constraint is internalized.

The lifecycle theory of saving and consumption predicts that changes in an economy's rate of economic growth will affect its aggregate saving rate by changing the lifetime resources of younger people relative to older people. However, studies that track the saving behavior of cohorts of household heads over time as they age have yielded estimates of age-saving profiles that are too flat for growth to have much effect on the aggregate saving rate. One problem with the cohort approach is that multigenerational households are common in many counties, and the age-saving profiles of households may be quite different from the age-saving profiles of individuals that make up households. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating individual age-saving profiles using household data. This method is applied to data from Taiwan and Thailand. We find that the individual method yields results that are more favorable to the lifecycle model. These results imply that changes in the rate of economic growth may in some circumstances have large effects on the aggregate saving rate. However, the size and sign of these effects depends on the rate of economic growth and the rate of population growth, and in many cases the effect of growth on saving is small.

Declining fertility, mortality, and productivity rates in developed countries and the popularity of the social security privatization in Chile as a pathway to financial development have sparked a global interest in social security reform. This paper analyzes the effect of social security on saving using a panel of countries over 25 years. Variation in the characteristics of social security systems is used to determine whether less reliance on a pay-as-you-go, unfunded system is associated with higher national saving. There is little evidence that countries that implement defined-contribution reforms have higher trends in saving rates after the reform. Cross-sectionally, countries with pay-as-you-go systems tend to have lower saving rates, and this effect increases with the coverage rate on the system.