Abstract
It depends what we want to measure. Most literature has focused on observed flow of savings (per-period savings as fraction of GDP), which has declined persistently since 1980. Even though this decline means that fewer funds are available for investment in each period, it does not follow that the households’ actual savings (underlying, not observed, savings determined by dynamic optimization) also go down. We theoretically link these two concepts, discuss the conditions under which they move in opposite directions, and show that indeed the actual savings has sharply increased since 1980. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
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