National Savings

By: Aaron Schwartz
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:17:27
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National savings are material standards of life that include savings of private sector, firms and governments. Such standards comprise also superannuation - the key element of private savings. Private or households savings may be determined as domestic savings divided by household disposable income. National savings are basically dependent on consumption opportunities. Savings may be positive or negative.

Speaking of Australia’s national savings performance we are focusing on the last two decades; this period is the most significant for the world economic processes: the world economy has undergone a revolution reflecting the forces of globalization and technological change. Australia’s savings performance may be shown from different points of view. Thus Fitzgerald in his report published in July 1992 shows that national saving has fallen to 16% of GDP, which is the lowest level this century for Australia. He thinks that Australia has excessive hope on overseas debt, a big lack of investment, jobs and economic growth and will not be able to pay for its aging population’s retirement.

The other author John Quiggin in his Commentary dated of September 02, 2003 argues that both gross and net national savings have been stable for the last decade or so but as for last several years in contrast to showing near-zero GDP growth national accounts released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics include the startling information that Australia now has negative household savings.

Statistics illuminates that over the long period (from the 1960s onward), the private sector has been the main contributor to national savings. But, situation changed since 1960’s and thus during last two decades, the net saving of the household sector relative to GDP has fallen.

In general government sector the picture is not so stable. The contribution of government went from being a net dissaver during the 1980s to a net saver in 1990s-2000: during the early 1990s, government dissaving was progressively reduced and between 1997-98 and 2002-03 the government sector became a net saver again.

In the corporate sector (financial and non-financial corporations) we see substantial variations. Thus during much of the 1990s, the corporate sector has been a net saver. The Government of Australia in its Budget initiative makes broadly based savings rebate through the taxation system. Such savings abatements are available to people who make personal member retirement contributions, and/or who earn net personal profit from other savings and investments.

Since the early 1990s Australia has had an obligatory retirement pension scheme. And as it was mentioned above, private savings have been falling steadily, and are now less than 3% of disposable income. At that the national savings rate has fallen too. In Australia there has been a gross change in savings into pensions and life insurance and away from forms like repayment of home mortgages, but there was no improvement in the total.

Present days some people concerned about country’s savings too little. What is really scaring is the fact that even a successful effort to increase national savings and investment proportions might have little effect on the rate of economic growth, because even such efforts would not alter a basic growth model.

Finally the next question arises: what index of savings is right. Probably it is the level that appears when households are free to distribute their income between present and future consumption motivating it by their personal predilections, in relatively unchanged economic circumstances. During the last two decades economists were deeply concerned about the quite low level of national savings. Government of the country has always hoped on foreign capital in addition to domestic savings and finance it’s economic development. Such policy is based on the experience of the previous governments provided macro-economic settings resulted in effective use of external capital - in simple phrase, roviding a reimbursement capable of servicing their foreign capital commitments.

To improve situation next measures were undertaken: part of household savings increased, because firms and governments have no money of their own: their funds and commitments are owned by individuals. Soon it became clear that changes in one component of savings would bring some extent by changes in others. Efforts to extend one form of household savings by regulation would be possibly followd by reductions in other forms of household savings. Specialists recommend to government to provide its own savings or dissavings (operating surpluses or deficits), and also to bring taxes and welfare policies. Compulsory savings schemes provided in Australia unfortunately do little or nothing to extent aggregate national savings: these schemes are inclened to have negative effects on growth through distortion of savings and investment patterns.

Favourable circumstances for savings has been provided in recent years with lower inflation, deregulation of the financial system, lower profit taxes and the introduction of GST, moves towards a more limited welfare safety net, and an end to public sector dissavings. Critical remarks are addressed to the government’s proposals to extend spending, reduce the necessity for self-sufficiency of health, education and retirement income savings, and reduce its own savings.

As a counclusion it should be said that in this work such problems were illuminated: index of national savings in Australia for the last 20 years; measures undertaken to increase level of savings which is negative now. Effective policy need to be elaborated by Government in tight cooperation with social services and public organizations in order to provide social protectability of population, especially of it’s strata which are the most vulnerable (such as superannuated) in the face of economic cataclisms and crises.

Article source: Expert Articles