CULTURE AND SAVINGS: WHY DO ASIANS SAVE MORE?

Dezhu Ye (), Shuang Pan (), Yujun Lian and Yew-Kwang Ng ()
Additional contact information
Dezhu Ye: Department of Finance, Research Institute of Finance, Jinan University, Guangzhou, P. R. China
Shuang Pan: Department of Finance, Jinan University, Guangzhou, P. R. China
Yujun Lian: Department of Finance, Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, P. R. China
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: 玉君 连 ()

The Singapore Economic Review (SER), 2021, vol. 66, issue 03, 621-651

Abstract: It is a basic consensus that culture affects savings, but the empirical evidence is inadequate. This paper investigates the relationship between culture and savings by using the Hofstede cultural indices, and macro data across 48 countries over the period 1990–2013. The results show that country-fixed effects are highly significant, even if traditional variables are controlled for. We discover that culture can explain much of these individual effects and thus is very important in explaining differences in savings across countries. We use the method of Relative Importance Analysis (RIA) to measure the relative importance of the various cultural dimensions in affecting saving rates. We find that culture-related variables are among the most important saving determinants, along with other variables more commonly used in the economics literature, such as economic growth, social security, and demographics.

Keywords: Culture; saving rates; Hofstede cultural indices; long-term orientation; relative importance analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217590819500607
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:serxxx:v:66:y:2021:i:03:n:s0217590819500607

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0217590819500607

Access Statistics for this article

The Singapore Economic Review (SER) is currently edited by Euston Quah

More articles in The Singapore Economic Review (SER) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().