There are two major differences between Japan and the United States in the way saving is calculated in their national accounts. First, depreciation in Japanese national accounts is based on historical costs, which leads to an understatement of true depreciation and hence an overstatement of net saving. Second, government capital formation is not included in U.S. saving. This article adjusts the official Japanese saving numbers by evaluating depreciation at replacement costs and excluding government capital formation from saving. Doing so significantly reduces the apparent gap between the national saving rates of the two countries. Since 1970 Japan's national saving rate has been declining to the stationary U.S. rate. This trend, however, has been reversed in recent years. In contrast, Japan's wealth-to-income ratio (excluding land), after declining in the late 1950s, has been rising toward the U.S. ratio and has reached the U.S. level in 1987.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in its journal Quarterly Review.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.