IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/gtechp/978-3-031-42216-4_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Savings and Investment Analysis

In: Alvin Hansen

Author

Listed:
  • Robert J. Bigg

Abstract

Hansen saw the world from an inherently dynamic viewpoint. What propelled a dynamic economy was investment. The business cycle was ultimately an investment cycle, and what drove that dynamism was his triumvirate of technological progress, territorial and natural resource expansion, and population growth. If one took savings as given, then the issues resolved to a failure to find or fill the profitable outlets for the nation’s savings. Whilst monetary and institutional factors could complicate that process they were not fundamental. Hansen’s savings and investment analysis grew out of his understanding of a continental influenced theory of crisis, through the works of Spiethoff, Tugan-Baranowsky, Wicksell, Schumpeter and Robertson. Reflecting his interest in dynamics he found period analysis far more conducive than Keynes’s statical approach. A key concern was the financial plumbing that made this happen. That raised questions of changes in hoarding as well as the role of institutional savings, financial markets, and corporate saving (retained profits and depreciation allowances) in relation to external finance. This weakened the relationship between the rate of interest, savings and investment. In turn this added to the realisation that whilst monetary policy had a role to play it could not be the prime mover. Fiscal policy could not only fill that role but also achieve far more in terms of redistribution and the provision of public services than the market could do on its own.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert J. Bigg, 2023. "Savings and Investment Analysis," Great Thinkers in Economics, in: Alvin Hansen, pages 219-251, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:gtechp:978-3-031-42216-4_10
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-42216-4_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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:pal:gtechp:978-3-031-42216-4_10. 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    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.