Why global saving patterns differ
Keyu Jin says the difficulty of credit access in China may explain the choices of its army of savers
Ever since the integration of emerging markets into the global economy began in the early 1990s, three striking trends have emerged: a divergence in private savings rates between the industrialised core and the emerging periphery (the former experiencing a steady decline, and the latter a sharp rise); large global imbalances between the two regions; and a drop in interest rates worldwide.
But, while global imbalances have preoccupied many observers, few have sought to explain the divergence in world savings behaviour.
In 1988, the household savings rate in China and the United States was roughly equal, at about 5 per cent. Yet, by 2007, China's household savings rate had risen to a staggering 30 per cent, compared to just 2.5 per cent in the US. The pattern is not uncharacteristic of other industrialised countries relative to emerging markets over the past two decades.
Savings behaviour reacts to changes in interest rates, which have fallen steadily over the past 20 years to today's record-low levels. But how can savings patterns be so different - often opposite - in globalised economies that are integrated into world capital markets?
The answer may be that credit markets are more developed in advanced economies than they are in emerging countries, particularly in terms of the degree to which households are able to borrow. Of course, one might argue that Asian thrift and American profligacy merely reflect asymmetric demands for credit: Asians are intrinsically more reluctant to borrow. In that case, however, the vast differences in household debt - ranging from 25 per cent of gross domestic product in emerging Asia (Southeast Asia, mainland China, India, Hong Kong and South Korea) to more than 90 per cent in the US and other Anglo-Saxon economies (including Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Britain) - would reflect only a dissimilarity in taste.
A more plausible explanation is that institutional differences in the ability to borrow dictate to some extent the disparity in savings rates across countries. The argument is simple: all economies have both borrowers and savers, and changes in the cost of borrowing affect them differently. When interest rates decline, borrowers are able to borrow more. Savers, on the other hand, may be compelled to save more in the face of shrinking interest income.
At the macro level, a less credit-constrained economy (with a large mass of effective borrowers) could then experience a fall in the savings rate as borrowing rose. However, in a country with a large mass of effective savers, the savings rate can rise, rather than fall. This asymmetry in savings patterns might thus reflect the simple fact that credit-constrained economies are less sensitive to drops in the cost of borrowing relative to less constrained economies.
