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Demography, national savings and international capital flows
This paper addresses the relationship between age distributions, national savings and the current account balance. The results point to substantial demographic effects, with increases in both the youth and old-age dependency ratios associated with lower savings rates. They also point to differential effects on savings and investment, and thus to a role for demography in determining the current account balance. The estimated demographic effect on the current account balance exceeds six percent of GDP over the last three decades for a number of countries and, given expected demographic trends, ...
Journal Article
The global saving glut and the fall in U.S. real interest rates: A 15-year retrospective
The authors revisit Ben Bernanke’s global saving glut (GSG) hypothesis from 2005—which links low long-term real interest rates in the United States to excess saving in a number of non-Western countries, including, but not limited to, China. Using an analytical framework and empirical data, they find that the ability of the GSG hypothesis to explain the fall in long-term real rates between 2002 and 2006 is likely much greater than its ability to account for the further fall in these rates from the Great Recession onward.