IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ime/imemes/v9y1991i2p63-78.html

Japan's High Saving Rate Reaffirmed

Author

Listed:
  • Robert Dekle

    (Assistant Professor, Boston University, U.S.A.)

  • Lawrence Summers

    (Vice President and Chief Economist, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank))

Abstract

Compared to the U.S. national accounts, the Japanese accounts understate consumption and government spending, and therefore overstate the national saving rate. Recently, Hayashi has recalculated Japan's national saving according to the American Department of Commerce definition and found that from the mid-1970s until today, Japan's national saving rate is nearly halved. In this paper, we argue that Hayashi's adjustments to the Japanese income accounts are exaggerated, and present measures of Japanese and U.S. private saving that are immune from national income accounting biases. Our saving measures are constructed from the balance sheets of the household sectors in the United States and Japan. Far from being equal, we find that the two country gap in saving rates in the early-1980s has averaged between 15 and 30 percentage points, depending on the measure.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert Dekle & Lawrence Summers, 1991. "Japan's High Saving Rate Reaffirmed," Monetary and Economic Studies, Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan, vol. 9(2), pages 63-78, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:ime:imemes:v:9:y:1991:i:2:p:63-78
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imes.boj.or.jp/research/papers/english/me9-2-3-1.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yoshida, Jiro, 2016. "Structure Depreciation and the Production of Real Estate Services," HIT-REFINED Working Paper Series 44, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    2. Dekle, Robert, 2004. "Financing consumption in an aging Japan: The role of foreign capital inflows and immigration," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 18(4), pages 506-527, December.
    3. David W. Campbell, 1999. "Explaining Japan's Saving Rate," Macroeconomics 9902004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Selahattin Imrohoroglu & Ayse Imrohoroglu & Kaiji Chen, 2006. "The Japanese Saving Rate," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(5), pages 1850-1858, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ime:imemes:v:9:y:1991:i:2:p:63-78. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kinken (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imegvjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.